White Collar is USA’s newest show.  It premiered last night fittingly enough in Psych’s timeslot.  It’s basic premise is that a con man/art thief/art forger/etc. breaks out of jail and the only FBI agent who was good enough to catch him the first time is called in from the middle of a tough case to catch him again.  He manages to track down the fugitive rather quickly.  It turns out he escaped to find his girlfriend who had dumped him.  She has disappeared off the grid.  He makes a deal with the agent to be let out into his custody under the circumstances that he’ll help the FBI catch this other guy and if he tries to escape he’ll go back to jail, not for the 4 years he’s supposed to, but for life.

Now I have a tradition for new shows.  First episodes are notoriously unreliable indicators of how good a show is going to be.  When they have less time and less money to produce episodes and have to make a story stretch to be television sized things can go really bad, or sometimes they can improve.  So before making any final judgements on a show I tend to give it 3 episodes unless I absolutely cannot stand it or it’s just not my thing for some reason.  So the preface to this review is that this is only one episode and what comes later could be vastly different.

That said I wasn’t amazed by this show.  The plot is paper thin and really makes no sense.  Things don’t work this way in real life.  But OK I’ll give them that one because it’s fiction and they can make shit up.  But it’s only partially that the main premise doesn’t work.  Lots of stuff doesn’t quite feel even close to real.  For example this brilliant criminal doesn’t really figure much out for himself.  Mainly it’s this other guy who does the work for him.  So shouldn’t he be the guy the FBI hires?  Clearly this criminal isn’t that great.  Also they kept it pretty vague as to what this guy actually did.  I’m betting this was done on purpose to allow for future plots (“Oh sure I know all about that cause I did it that one time”).  They did briefly flash a list of crimes and do mention him as an art thief but he’s supposedly more than that.  This vagueness isn’t very well done and just doesn’t work.  When you have a master criminal he’s got to have done something that the audience can see and connect with.  Here we only see him break out of jail, and even that a lot of the details are really kinda flaky.

I get the idea that they’re trying to fit this show into USA’s “Characters Welcome” approach by making the criminal this quirky character and really trying to get this to be something akin to a Burn Notice type show.  But it’s not.  This first episode seemed like nothing really happened and there certainly wasn’t any sort of detective work being done and all the information being spoon fed to the characters and us.

So enough about the wonderful charming cliche that is the criminal character.  Let’s move onto the cop.  He too is a walking cliche.  He’s the guy who spends all his time working and so he neglects his relationship with his lovely wife, Kelly Kapowski (Tiffany Thiessen, also can we drop this “Tiffany Thiessen” ruse already?

Tiffany AMBER Thiessen

Everybody knows you as Tiffany Amber Thiessen, or Kelly, or Mrs. Morris for the hardcore Saved By The Bell fans like me, let’s keep the Amber OK?).  This is pointed out ad nauseum, first when she complains in the first few minutes of the show that he spends more time hunting this guy then with her, then when she calls and has made dinner and he’s still not home because of course he’s still at the office, and then again when he forgets his anniversary is just days away, and then spends the rest of the episode trying to discover what she likes because he knows nothing about his wife of 12 years.  Oh also TAT is grossly miscast here.  I wouldn’t say she’s aged very well but she still looks young (and still is really) but the guy she’s supposed to be married to looks more like her father.  Also there is no chemistry there.  In fact that’s another not very good thing about this show.  It can really be summed up by saying that there’s just no spark to it.  Nothing is making it alive.

After reading all of the above I’m sure you assume I hated the show, but I didn’t.  I’m still on the fence.  It has so many negatives, but a lot of it could be fixed.  Even though it was bland it wasn’t outright horrible.  While watching I never got the urge to turn it off.  It just didn’t excite me or hit any particular chords with me added to all the above complaints.

I intend on giving it at least 2 more episodes to win me over or lose me as a viewer.

You can check it out for yourself over at Hulu.  Be sure to come back here to the comments section and share your thoughts.