ABC's BLACK BOX: Is It Worth It To Watch?

I've been enduring ridiculous ads for Black Box, about a brilliant doctor (Kelly Reilly) who has dark issues and gets hot and heavy with anyone she can, when she's off her meds.  Or so the relentless TV ads had us believe.

The pitch from ABC goes as follows:

"Catherine Black, a famed neuroscientist with a job at the Center for Neurological Research and Treatment, struggles with mental illness. However, this is just one of the many secrets she hides from her fiancé and her family."

Usually, when you watch a TV show and suffer through the marketing, you'll see what all the ads were about.  But this time around, I was in for an interesting surprise about the marketing and the series.


It seems that the ads we've been watching for weeks about Black Box pretty much were scenes from the first several minutes of the pilot episode.  It was surprising and disappointing all at once, to see the opening dialog as our primary character goes on a monologue of sorts, describing herself going off her meds, giving a speech to fellow scientifically minded doctors successfully and then bonking the limo driver.

The impression of seeing that the ads primarily were cut from the opening of the series was enough to deter my already wanning interesting about this series.

Yes, I bailed on the show.  But I looked around to see if I had blown it and missed a good show because I've been told that our main star is a great actress.

It seems I saved wasting an hour of my time.  And it's only a 13-episode series, so  we'll see if ABC actually airs the entire series, if people don't tune in.

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HitFix's Alan Sepinwall says "... we need good shows about complicated women, as opposed to something like ABC's new "Black Box" (it premieres tonight at 10), a clumsy, pretentious, cliché-riddled mess that just happens to have a woman at the center of things."

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Gail Pennington from STL Today says "This is, hands down, the worst series of the year, with the most annoying lead character in a season with many annoying lead characters."

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Matt Fowler from IGN, says "Wow.  I mean... Wow, you guys. This is horrible."

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Mary McNamara, from the LA Times, called it a "Flawed, derivative drama about a bipolar neurosurgeon lifts from 'Homeland' and 'House' as it treats mental illness in a simplistic manner."

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Zap2it's Terri Schwartz took the politically correct, middle road path and only explained details about the show without offering a bit of opinion.

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My take? I guess we're not missing anything.  That's a shame.

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