NBC's 'Crisis': Over the top but under control
Even parents with helicopters can't protect their kids from a high-tech kidnapping in TV's latest hostage drama.
* CRISIS. 10 p.m. Sunday, NBC10.
HELICOPTER parenting has its limits. Even when the parents involved have access to actual helicopters.
That's just one of the things we learn from NBC's new drama "Crisis," which takes kids in jeopardy, class conflict and adolescent (and national) insecurity and stirs them into a surprisingly effective thriller that premieres Sunday.
When students from an elite Washington, D.C., private school are ambushed and taken captive during a field trip that includes the president's son, the Secret Service and the FBI quickly find that the kidnappers aren't their only headaches.
They also have to outsmart the parents.
These masters and mistresses of the universe may not all live in the White House, but they're used to asking questions, not answering them, and when the kidnappers start contacting them directly, they can't be counted on to notify the feds. Or to put anyone's interests ahead of those of their own children.
It also doesn't help that multinational tech firm CEO Meg Fitch (Gillian Anderson) - who, yes, has a chopper at her disposal - is estranged from her younger sister, Susie Dunn (Rachael Taylor, "Charlie's Angels"), an FBI agent assigned to the case even though she's related to one of the abducted teens, Amber Fitch (Halston Sage).
Or that Agent Dunn is reluctantly paired with Secret Service agent Marcus Finley (Lance Gross), whose first day on the first son's protection team did not go terrifically well.
Creator Rand Ravich, who created the NBC drama "Life," starring Damian Lewis, before "Revenge" and "Scandal" made it de rigueur for TV shows to be named like perfumes (and before "Homeland" made Lewis the star that "Life" fans always knew he'd be), isn't afraid of unlikely scenarios.
"Life," which featured Lewis as a Los Angeles police detective freed from prison 12 years after being framed for a triple murder, worked because the characters were so good, not because the premise was remotely plausible.
Those who already confuse Dylan McDermott with Dermot Mulroney won't be helped by Mulroney's presence in "Crisis," given McDermott's leading role in CBS' D.C.-based thriller "Hostages" earlier this season.
Mulroney, based on the two episodes I've seen, has the more interesting character in Francis Gibson, a former CIA analyst with an exceedingly difficult relationship with his daughter Beth Ann (Stevie Lynn Jones), whose school trip he's nevertheless insisted on chaperoning.
Beth Ann, a scholarship kid, has a chip on her shoulder, but not, at least, inside it.
Maybe you've never thought of microchipping your kids (or maybe you've thought of it but didn't know it was something people actually did to non-canines), but I'm guessing it's now being done in some circles in LA, where the gated and catered-to moneyed are as security-conscious as anyone inside the Beltway.
In "Hostages," the bad guys used GPS to track the kids.
In "Crisis," it's the bad guys removing the chips the parents had implanted.
NBC wants us to ask ourselves how far we'd go to protect our children.
"Crisis" introduces us to parents who may already have gone too far.
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