New Amsterdam

New Amsterdam is another show with an interesting concept that fails in execution. The show is about a New York police detective named John Amsterdam who, among other things, is four hundred years old and is rather tired of living. In that he is almost exactly like Nicholas Knight from the show Forever Knight, except that he's not Canadian and he doesn't suck the blood of the living.

It seems that around the time that the Dutch thought they had purchased Manhattan for twenty four dollars (which, by the way, they hadn't, having run into some Native American con artists), John Amsterdam was a Dutch soldier in the New World. While participating in a punitive expedition against an Indian village, he restrained one of his mess mates from killing the Chief's daughter, thinking it uncouth to kill the women (men, on the other hand, were no problem.) Amsterdam took a musket ball in the gut for his troubles.

However, as a reward for saving the girl, the local Shaman not only brought Amsterdam back to life, but made him immortal (and I'm not making this up) by blowing smoke on his stomach. Here's where the concept starts to fall apart on close examination. If the gentle Native American had the secret of eternal life, why are they now consigned to running casinos while most of the continent is run by the White Man? It would seem that immortality would have been an advantage.

In any case, John Amsterdam is now a police detective in New York, which is the lazy TV writer's way of providing story lines of murder investigations while the main character searches for a way to die. As typical with TV immortals, Amsterdam has grown tired of living on while all of his loved ones grow old and pass on. The Shamans who gave him the immorality have told him that it will stop when he finds his true love, something Amsterdam has not been able to manage in four hundred years.

The whole concept of the soulful, lonely immortal has already been done and better, not only in the fore mentioned Forever Knight, but in Highlander, which did not have a main character as a cop. The murder mystery was the sort of thing one has seen a thousand times before in a hundred other cop shows. There was at least one glaring plot hole of our hero "dying", being pronounced dead in the trauma room, being consigned to the morgue with toe tag and all, and reviving, Amsterdam, exasperated at having experienced this for the hundredth time, just gets up and leaves. One wonders how the ER staff makes of the body of one John Amsterdam, police detective, vanishing. One would think they would have checked with the Police about that.