NBC's "The Cape" Tries Hard, Too Hard

I am a total comic book geek. Being a real life geek the super heroes were the guys I turned to, in my youth, to vicariously live an exciting life with characters who had powers I could only dream of. I always liked the characters who did not have massive amounts of powers. I was never a fan of Superman, but I loved Daredevil, Captain America and Batman. They were just people who used their gifts to become the best that they could and, thus, fight crime and fight opponents much more powerful than they were successfully. As a kid who was picked on and teased because he looked different, I related to that wished that I could do the same.

So, I had high hopes when commercials and previews of NBC's new show The Cape started to run last year. It looked like a guy who just had a cool costume and who used his intense physical training to fight the bad guys. This was my kind of guy.

Well, having watched the two hour premier, I can say that it is, indeed, a promising premise. The character has a lot of potential. The problem is the people who write and direct this show have to do a lot to make it work. The premier, did not.

The first hour of the show was a frantic disaster. For me, it was nearly unwatchable. We get introduced, quickly, to police officer Vincent Faraday. That is a terrible name for a super hero identity, by the way. Don't you know super heroes have short, quick, names? Clark Kent. Bruce Wayne. Peter Parker. Vincent Faraday takes four years to say.

What happens next happens at such a frantic and frenetic pace that it makes you wonder if the makers of The Cape thought the show would not last past the first episode. An origin story, told well, takes time to set up the characters. We should have gotten to know who this guy was, what he had done before, why we should care about him. Introducing him and then showing us he has a wife and kid are not enough to get us to care about him. During the second hour we learn he was a soldier first and then a cop. That is something that should have led things off.

Instead, the first hour is a frantic mess. Things happen so far, without much set up or explanation, that you just want to shout "Slow down!" Things are flung at the screen as of the writers and directors wanted to get the origin story over with as quickly as they could so they could get to some good fight scenes. So it goes: bang, he's framed, bang ,he's being trained, bang, he's fighting crime, bang, here's a girl for him to team up with.

Therein lies the next problem. I am a huge fan of actress Summer Glau. I would say it is safe to say she is a major TV crush. Here, her character is easily the worst in the series. Who is she? Why is she? What is she? She just suddenly appears in one scene, with no set up, and suddenly she and The Cape are teamed up. She becomes just a second-rate version of the character Chloe Sullivan from Smallville and she is much, much less interesting.

The second hour of the premier did something that the first hour should have done. It slowed down. It was still not particularly good, but it was definitely better paced. We got to see The Cape actually being a police detective. He actually takes the time to solve some crimes. We learn more about his past. Some efforts are made to make us finally care about the character of Vincent Faraday.

Of course, in any comic book story, the hero is never as interesting as the villains. Here, too, however, The Cape falls down. The lead villain is called Chess who seems to have the power to have weird eyes. Even his costume is rather lame. Vinnie Jones is Scales as a thug who has, well, scales, which is something right out of a Dick Tracy comic. Then there is Cain, a guy with throwing knives and a knack for poisons. They are OK as far as villains go, but hardly arch-enemy types like The Joker, The Green Goblin or Lex Luthor. They aren't even in the same field as Captain America's Red Skull.

The second hour did give me hope, however, that maybe some good writers and some less-frantic direction might help. If it were me, I would have used the entire first hour to set up Faraday, establish him as a cop, and then ended that first hour with him being framed. I would then have given the entire second hour to him being trained and becoming The Cape with him fighting his first criminals at the end of the second hour. Then, in the next episode, he could face off against Chess. But that's me. No one from Hollywood calls me back to get my input, anyway.

So, I don't hold out much hope for The Cape lasting. Perhaps it will become a cult-favorite kind of thing. Maybe, just maybe, if the writers relaxed and let the story tell itself, it might work. However, these days, when a show is lucky to get two episodes to survive, maybe such a thing is impossible in modern television.