After airing just seven episodes, NBC announced last Thursday that it’s pulling the plug on UnderCovers, the series starring Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as husband-and-wife spy team/restaurant owners Stephen and Samantha Bloom, pulled out of retirement by the CIA for special missions. This is a big disappointment for African American television viewers who had high hopes for the first hour-long series to star black actors in lead roles. Indeed, had UnderCovers been a hit, it could have opened the doors for more lead television roles for black actors.
NBC certainly did its part to lay the groundwork for the show to succeed, soliciting the support of black community influencers via previews and actor appearances at events such as the 2010 convention of the National Association of Black Journalists and the Black Enterprise Golf & Tennis Challenge. It also marshaled an aggressive social media campaign for UnderCovers on Twitter and Facebook, with Kodjoe doing a yeoman’s job of tweeting to fans of the show. (Follow Boris Kodjoe on Twitter.) Plus, the show had two attractive and likable stars in the lead roles. (Kodjoe has a huge and loyal female fan base; Mbatha-Raw is a talented actress and arguably one of the most beautiful women on television.) So why did it fail?
The truth is (and it kills me to say this), UnderCovers just isn’t very good. In fact, I couldn’t bear to watch a full episode of the series since the second episode, where the sad running “joke” was that world-class spy Stephen Bloom couldn’t work the coffee machine. (Why would he even care to try?) It’s not that the show doesn’t have its fans, judging from the outcry I hear–from people I know personally as well as those I’m connected with via social media–that the show is not getting a fair chance to succeed. However, the ratings indicate that UnderCovers‘ loyalists are being outvoted. After starting with a high of nearly 8.6 million viewers with the pilot episode, viewership fell to a low of 5.45 million by the sixth episode. UnderCovers hasn’t pulled more than 6 million viewers since the third episode.
I was one of the attendees at the NABJ convention in San Diego in the audience for a special preview of the first episode of UnderCovers. The fatal flaws I saw in the show then were only confirmed as I tried to commit to watching it as the fall television season began. Then, as now, I believed the show could be the hit we all hoped it would be, even if it didn’t open a floodgate of quality lead television roles for black actors (probably an unfair burden for any new show to carry). In fact, with the following changes, it still can be:
1. Leave ’80s television in the ’80s. The writers of the show seem to be going for the light blend of comedy, drama and romance featuring an attractive couple that characterized hit television shows of 20-30 years ago, i.e. Hart to Hart and Moonlighting. But that kind of programming just doesn’t cut it in 2010. We live in a dangerous world of terrorist threats (both global and domestic), cynical politics, ethically challenged conglomerates, acts of genocide and international conspiracies–all covered on CNN. Any show featuring experienced, world-class undercover CIA operatives has to reflect that. So forget Jonathan and Jennifer Hart–they wouldn’t last 15 minutes in the world that Stephen and Samantha Bloom live in. Think Mr. & Mrs. Smith meets 24. That also means that there needs to be a broader, multi-episode story arc established immediately, instead of each episode being comprised of complete adventures wrapped up in a neat little bow–again, very ’80s. Not only should there be a cliff-hanger after every episode, I should be holding my breath (or at least kept guessing) at every commercial break.
2. If you must add comedy, make it adult comedy. Kill the lame “Awww shucks, they’re just like a regular married couple except THEY’RE SPIES” comedy attempts. No one wants to see John Shaft or Jason Bourne–or even Austin Powers–struggling to work a coffee machine. If you want world-class spy humor, think James Bond (cracking jokes after he breaks someone’s neck or kicks them off a plane at 30,000 feet without a parachute), not Lucille Ball. By the way, Samantha Bloom would not be taking calls from her younger, perenially overwhelmed, alcoholic sister about restaurant over-booking problems while on a mission, not if you want us to take her seriously. It’s not realistic. Worse, it’s not remotely funny.
3. In fact, fire the sister and staff the restaurant with CIA operatives.
If the Blooms are such brilliant and dangerous operatives, the CIA would just take over the restaurant to protect the Blooms’ cover, allow them to focus on their missions and, most importantly, to keep tabs on them. This would also add to the danger, conspiracy and potential for deception and betrayal a show like this desperately needs. The world-class sous chef could also be a deadly double agent. The quiet dishwasher could be a CIA plant with orders to monitor the Blooms and to eliminate them if the agency deems it necessary. The opportunities for suspense, surprise and mystery are endless. The Blooms shouldn’t be able to truly trust anyone–and neither should the audience.4. A makeover for the Blooms. Cut the cute, attractive, romantic couple shtick. The show’s creators are banking too hard on the characters being likable. The Blooms need to be seen as–above everything else–the best at what they do. Dangerous. Scary. I mean BAD, so hardcore (again, think 24‘s Jack Bauer), that we are never totally sure that they are the good guys, that they’re on our side, and relieved any time we find that, in the end, they are. As CIA operatives, they need to make choices, including lying, betrayal and killing people, that challenge our sense of morality, and theirs, too. Moreover, their lives (both their secret pasts and their present) should test their trust in, and thus their love for, one another. The Blooms should be physically and emotionally scarred from the lives they’ve led, and heroic despite, not in the absence of, that damage. They should be hard, not nice, people–vulnerable only when it suits them, and only to one another. Here’s what I’d do with the lead characters:
Kodjoe should play Stephen Bloom just as he has thus far: handsome, funny, charming and disarming. But it should all be a cover for the fact that he is a cold, emotionless, ruthless and expert professional killer willing and able to use every means, including any weapon–poisons, explosives, household objects and his bare hands, to terminate his target. Killing is not personal, it’s just part of the job–and something he’s so good at that he scares Samantha. Worse, Stephen knows that if it came down to it, he has the
skill to kill his own wife, despite her experience and training. And his biggest nightmare is that he might have to. By the way, he did not come out of retirement by choice–the CIA is blackmailing him with a death sentence for assassinating a world dictator earlier in his career. (This mission was ordered by his then superiors in the CIA at the time, but mysteriously all evidence of those orders, including the people who gave them, have disappeared.) In short, Stephen Bloom should be television’s answer to Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne. This is not a dude who would be so easily distracted by a few scantily clad women that he would lose an enemy operative in a club, as a hapless Stephen so ineptly did in the second episode.Mbatha-Raw already brings the right aura of cool proficiency to the role of Samantha Bloom. But it must be clear that she is also a professionally trained killer, proficient with both weapons and hand-to-hand combat–though, unlike Stephen, she is morally conflicted about having to kill. However, Samantha is deadly in a totallydifferent way: as a master of misinformation, infiltration and manipulation, as well as a world class hacker, thief and safe cracker, willing to use blackmail, identity theft, technology attacks and industrial espionage to achieve her ends. Samantha is so good at lying that even her husband is never sure she is telling the truth, how many secrets she keeps or how far she’ll go to maintain subterfuge in order to complete her mission. In fact, Samantha chose to come out of retirement only to protect a secret from her past so big, but buried so deeply in a morass of half-truths and misinformation, that even the CIA doesn’t know the real truth. And she’s determined that, no matter what, her husband can never find out. Unfortunately, the stress of keeping track of all of her lies and deceptions keeps Samantha under constant mental and emotional strain.
5. Forget about “sexpionage”–make this a love story. We get it: Kodjoe and Mbatha-Raw are easy to look at. In fact, they’re gorgeous. But stop the contrived efforts to show them half-naked. Believe it or not, they are no less sexy with their clothes on. Instead of focusing on sex appeal, UnderCovers
presents a ground-breaking opportunity to present a loving bond between a black man and a black woman, capable of withstanding every test, including deception, torture, infidelity, distrust, dark secrets, morally reprehensible choices and painful revelations that would destroy most relationships. By the way, when they do get naked, their bodies should show the scars–from bullets, knives, shrapnel and physical beatings–that are the badges of living life as dangerous undercover operatives, with those scars also helping to tell the story of the wear and tear their love has endured. Their lives put their relationship in constant danger, but their heroism and devotion to each other repeatedly pulls it back from the brink when all love seems lost. It’s a bond between black men and black women that’s survived the Middle Passage, lynching, Jim Crow and institutional racism, adapted to a 21st century in which black love remains under constant threat by enemies foreign and domestic. Now that is romantic.And finally, the most important change of all:
6. Terminate Bill Hoyt, the computer expert (played by Ben Schwartz) with the man-crush on Stephen Bloom. With extreme prejudice. Or at least add a sinister, dark underbelly to the geeky character. How about having his hero worship of Bloom evolve into a gay fatal-attraction, driving him to secretly plot the death of Samantha?
By the way, in case I haven’t been clear, the problem with UnderCovers is NOT the lead actors. I happen to believe that both Kodjoe and Mbatha-Raw are well-suited for their roles, even with my changes. If anything, they’re being under-utilized as actors, in favor of them being eye candy. They deserve better.
Anyway, that’s what I’d do. Though UnderCovers is canceled, NBC plans to air three more episodes of the show through December 1, and another three episodes, already in the can, will be aired sometime after that. Though no one is saying so, NBC could give the show another chance. If that doesn’t happen, Kodjoe has tweeted that he hopes BET might consider picking it up. In any case, with the above changes, I think the show can still be a hit.
Be honest: Did you like UnderCovers? Why or why not? Can UnderCovers get a do-over? Should it? What do you think?