Pictured: (l-r) Boris Kodjoe as Steven Bloom, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Samantha Bloom -- Photo by: Art Streiber/NBC
When a marriage begins to get a little stale, nothing relights the fires of passion quite like occasional clandestine intelligence operations in a foreign country.
That's the tongue-in-cheek takeaway of Undercovers, the prime-time NBC series making its debut on Wednesday at 8 p.m. Undercovers weds romance and action like some of its antecedents, including the long-ago Hart to Hart series and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (both the short-lived 1996 CBS TV series, and the 2005 Brangelina vehicle). But the tweaks here -- fresh production values, a sensibility of life in the post-9/11 era and a refreshing departure in its casting -- make this one to watch as much to see how the series conforms to TV spycraft convention as to how much it flouts it.
VIDEO: Boris Kodjoe talks to theGrio: 'You gotta keep it s*xy'
The series architects have an impressive pedigree. Co-created by J.J. Abrams (whose Lost, Fringe and Alias on the small screen and Star Trek and Mission: Impossible III in theaters have marked him as a one-man industry) and Josh Reims (Brothers and Sisters, What About Brian), the series puts a modern entrepreneurial spin on the spies-in-love-and-danger formula.
Steven and Samantha Bloom are two former CIA covert operatives who retired after falling in love five years earlier. They're now successful caterers living and working in Los Angeles (with Samatha's sister Lizzy, played by Nekia Cox, late of 90210 and Smallville). The couple balances marriage and career until they're visited by Carlton Shaw (the reliable Gerald McRaney, from Deadwood), a high-ranking CIA operative who reinstates them with the agency to search for Leo Nash (Carter McIntyre from Nip/Tuck), a former associate gone missing while in pursuit of a Russian arms dealer.
WATCH THIS VIDEO ABOUT 'UNDERCOVERS'
The Blooms sprint through various foreign capitals to track him down. A resourceful but sycophantic CIA field agent, Bill Hoyt (Ben Schwartz from NBC's Parks and Recreation), helps the Blooms wherever they're planted.
The series benefits from the two leads -- Boris Kodjoe (of Soul Food and featured in the just-released Resident Evil: Afterlife) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Doctor Who, Bonekickers) -- being relative unknowns. Their appearance here is an implicit bid to step outside the box of the casting comfort zone of network TV. Not only are they new faces, they're black faces in an industry whose tendencies toward risk aversion have historically made such casting more the exception than the rule.
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Wednesday, September 22nd 2010 at 8:41PM
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