Instinct S1-S2

Honestly, how many clichés can a show stack up? Think a number, then multiply it by ten, and maybe you'll get close to that poor poor poor "Instinct". How can a studio green-light such a pathetic so-called thriller where everything is predictable, the characters just so caricatural, the plot insanely uninteresting, for you have seen the same one in every third-tier movie for the last 25 years or so... Alan Cumming, which we all loved in the Good Wife, is ugly, boring, playing gay with a heavinesss and a lack of nuance that is almost laughable. Well, I'd rather tell you the show is great and worth the 45 minutes you'll spend watching it... Nevermind. Awful is the word.

Alan Cummings plays a former CIA agent now turned successful author and professor named Dr. Dylan Reinhart whose publisher Joan Ross (Whoopi Goldberg) tells Dylan that his most recent storyline is missing the magic that was present in his first book. Joan suggests to Dylan that he needs to become active in the field again to regain his lost writers mojo. So Dylan agrees to tag team with a young and pretty blonde detective named Lizzie Needham (Bojana Novakovic) and their on screen tag team magic is quite evident from the get go. Detective Lizzie Needham and scholar/writer Dylan Reinhart feed off of each other in solving this the pilot episodes first murders. This particular serial killer murders each victim and at the murder scene the killer leaves one (1) of the fifty-two (52) poker playing cards to which Detective Needham and Dylan have to figure out the cards clue in solving the next murder before it happens The TV series writers did more than an adequate job of keeping their audience in suspense and the on screen chemistry between actors Alan Cummings and Bojana Novakovic was very entertaining. This new series has some good momentum with this the pilot episode and I trust the series writers will provide new material each week to sustain and maintain a new audience. I give the series an excellent 8 out of 10 rating and look forward to seeing more of the same.

I once thought Bones was the most insulting effort for a series I'd ever tried to watch without vomiting. This show is far worse, because it copies so much of Bones, the entire production staff should be pilloried. Oddball ex-CIA paired with a less odd female detective, and I doubt either can get their shoes on the proper feet without assistance. I watched the first episode, and it was too campy for its inferior script, so I skipped episode two, and hoped by episode three it might have found its bearings. It's already been noted in another review that episode three of Instinct ripped off the plot of the murdered Amish boy, a piano prodigy, and it shamelessly plagiarizes the Bones script with a few very minor changes. I hope the screenwriters volunteered their inferior services, and the network wasn't stupid enough to actually pay for this tripe. I know I won't be back for future episodes, because this isn't even a "nice try" at entertaining anyone. I liked Alan Cumming in Good Wife, but he must have been drunk when he reviewed this script and decided it sounded like a winner.

I watched (using that term loosely) the first episode of this new show last evening. My barometer of television is usually how long it takes from the start before I reach for my phone and start reading the news or looking at some other app or doing a spot of online shopping. This show.... 4 minutes maximum. The writing is terrible. The acting is even worse. How does rubbish like this get funded? I'll be honest, I don't really know about the story because I was distracted reading the news but what bits I did see or hear or both were just so trite, so badly acted it was like watching a school production but a sports team not the theatre class, and then to top it all off the throw in a sprinkle of gay fairy dust to try to entice us... or put off the rednecks maybe? Anyways, badly acting, and no amount of gay rainbow fairy dust is going to save this trash from ending up where it should have remained in the first place.

I waited several shows and didn't like it, made a review I'm now editing, saw tvbythenumbers leaning towards cancel, and then CBS renews this dud.I'm editing basically to say that this genre is so used (Elementary, Monk, Diagnosis Murder,Mentalist,Murder She Wrote, Deception,etc) that new ones need some freshness. To me the two main characters simply don't connect, and there are too many extras (book editor, former spy friend, main character's spouse). Now that it's renewed I'm not drawn to it so now I have an open time slot.