Fox TV's Standoff: Raising New Fears

This Fall's TV premiere season is upon us, and there are a lot of new offerings. One show to pass on, though, is Fox's Standoff. The show, airing on Tuesday's at 9 PM, follows two top hostage negotiators for the FBI's Crisis Negotiation Unit (CNU). Matt Flannery (played by Ron Livingston) and Emily Lehman (played by Rosemarie DeWitt) prevent hostage crisises from escalating.

The pair does little to inspire confidence in their skills as negotiators or in the skills of real hostage negotiators, if they are meant to be a mirror. There seems to be very little tact in their tactics and they make a lot of mistakes, which fortunately for their hostages is not fatal because of the magic of television. The pair saves the day in every episode, all the while fighting their carnal urges for each other.

Dewitt and Livingston have little chemistry together with Livingston barely looking aware of his surrounding as he flatly delivers his lines. Livingston has yet to make his mark in much of anything and doesn't seem to be much of a leading man. Dewitt is unmemorable as his partner and blurs into the sea of the other brunettes on TV.

The premiere features a privileged Caucasian boy, who terrorizes a local coffee shop under the guise of a Muslim extremist terrorist all to get back at his mother for not loving him. The second episode centered on a jilted air traffic controller who crashes his best friend (and rivals) airplane after he learns his wife has been cheating on him. You can't make up contrived drama like that except that someone actually did. And then it was aired on network TV as a new drama series. In all fairness, the writers were going for shock value with these plots.

They probably imagined their scripts as socially relevant themes that would be didactic for the masses and invite dialogues among politicians to alert them to potential dangers. Of course, rather than offering a means to avert them, they merely show the catastrophe after it has passed from mere threat to reality.

There is no prevention in Standoff only crisis management. Rather than promote clever social dialogue about serious topics, these episodes only promote fear. The premiere reminds us that not only do we have to fear foreign terrorist attacks but threats from our local jaded and over-privileged youth. We can be terrorized at any time, even in that local coffee shop we go in to every day.

The second episode gave us a new potential danger when flying. We thought we only needed to fear high-jackers. As if that huge and overwhelming danger wasn't enough we now have a new target to fear when flying the ironically termed friendly skies, our very own air traffic controllers whom we rely on so much without even acknowledging or realizing it.

The one bright spot in this show's terrifying first two episodes is Gina Torres, Cheryl Carrera head of the Los Angeles CNU. She commands respect and draws your focus every time she is on the screen. Sadly, in the first two episodes she is given very little to do.

I eagerly anticipate next week's episode to find out what new and unexpected thing to fear. I'm sure it will be something I never thought about.