There’s a certain quaintness to Countdown, the new pulpy procedural on Prime Video. Everything about it feels recognizable – you’ve got the mile-high stakes, the peppy banter, the camaraderie in a tough job protecting the world from bad guys. In this case, the ensemble is a scrappy, interagency team-up with cops, DEA, FBI, and more coming together to avert catastrophe. Few other procedurals have the ambition to pull almost every law enforcement acronym into their lineup – though the upcoming Dick Wolf spin-off originally titled FBI: CIA sure tried – Countdown feels like an apex of the genre, pushing its core concepts to new, wildly unwieldy heights.
The “elite” task force kicks off when a Department of Homeland Security officer is killed in the middle of Los Angeles. This technically makes Countdown an ensemble series, with each member of the force having their own domain: hacking, field work, and so on. But if we have a central character, it’s Mark Meachum (Jensen Ackles), an LAPD officer who’s hiding a secret. He’s our point of view, and often far too riddled with cliches: suffice it to say he’s a cop who has an extremely specific reason (which I won’t spoil here) for putting his life on the line. As Meachum and colleagues pull at the curiosities around the murder they’ve been assembled to solve, they find that there’s a much larger, much more dangerous conspiracy at play. (Isn’t there always?) It’s the sort of thing that could get way more than just a DHS officer killed.
Everything here is familiar, and none of that will bring much comfort. Countdown, for all its conventionality, is a cold show. The story moves fast, and the characters do too, which doesn’t leave space for personality. There’s a glossiness that isn’t particularly offensive but isn’t all that interesting either. Compare it to classics of the genre like 24 or Burn Notice, and there’s a distinct lack of flair to Countdown’s proceedings.
That same blandness spreads to the characters and the story: cheeky banter falls flat; it’s superficial filler, with no voice or personality behind it. Connections are forged, but they don’t feel all that meaningful. Even when they’re a bit harder won – like the one between Meachum and his DEA partner, Amber Oliveras (Jessica Camacho) that takes a couple episodes to spark – it’s mechanical, and their dialogue doesn’t have much heart or character.
Instead, every member on the task force speaks with the same tone. This isn’t an unheard of style for television, but there’s not a distinctive flair to the scripts either. This isn’t Gilmore Girls or Veronica Mars, where the heightened affectation paints a whole world; Countdown wants something closer to reality, but can’t imbue its characters with anything worth engaging with. There’s just not enough texture to each of their lives. When we finally see the house of team leader Nathan Blythe (Eric Dane), it’s played for a major reveal. But not once does it seem like Countdown cares about its characters enough to make any unseen home lives feel like a telling choice about who they are.
Given how much the show strives to be a sort of throwback, this seems like the missing link for the Countdown formula. Even the most repetitive procedurals like NCIS pull in viewers again and again because people like the characters; the things we see them do or the people they are outside of work is the reason to watch them solve crimes. By contrast, Countdown gives us nothing: As the team goes through the motions of a law-enforcement procedural, it all feels robotic. We get bonding scenes, action sequences, heartfelt monologues, and repeated commitments to protecting the greater good. But without room for the characters to exhale or let their hair down, it’s all far too rote.
Ultimately there’s not a lot to love about Countdown. You can get sucked into the conspiracy, twisting its way through Los Angeles with a cliffhanger deployed in the final moments of every episode. There’s also some excitement in the way that the team circles closer to the culprit through the tiny nuggets of information they track down. But for a manhunt story like this to work, there needs to be a bit more thrill to the chase. Otherwise, it’s just dull.
