Ringer pilot - It has potential...to be either good or really, really disappointing

This is spoiler-free, but stay out of the comments

Ringer is a crowd-pleaser. If your crowd has ADHD, doesn't look at things closely, and doesn't care about the thought processes and feelings of characters. The show has many twists, a pretty blonde lead, the makings of a decent love triangle, danger, and fast pacing. The scenes are very short, like in Sex and the City or X-Men First Class. The showrunners know that the viewers’ attention span is short before they are hooked on a show, so the pilot did a lot of jumping around between characters and did a lot in a short period of time. While some might have found this distracting and confusing, we liked it.

You know what's going to happen in the set-up of this show, so it's best that they get on with it as quickly as possible. If you saw the preview or have been reading anything about this one, you pretty much know everything about the pilot. If you haven’t seen the preview and if you are completely lost as to what happens on this show, you will be entertained by the pilot, but underwhelmed by the flat characters. We hope they become interesting later on. It’s not just plot that needs to have layers.

We wouldn’t say this is high quality, artistic stuff. It’s guilty-pleasure mystery/noir. We liked the presence of Richard Alpert from LOST, and Sarah Michelle Gellar is more than fine. A commenter pointed out earlier that she played both characters too similarly, but we think we haven’t seen enough of Siobhan to determine that yet. Siobhan was clearly putting on an act for her sister, and her reputation with her family is completely different from the Siobhan we saw interacting with Bridget when the reunited for the first time in six years.

We wonder if many people would like the idea of trading lives with someone else. You know how it’s so much easier to give advice about other people’s problems than do the right thing in your own life? Someone else’s life would be less painful and easier. The people wouldn’t grate on you like the people you’ve have to live with for years or grow up with. The problems would be simpler, if only because you wouldn’t care as much and the emotions, good and bad, would be gone. You’d have a little more freedom. You wouldn’t be too worried about messing things up, because it’s not even your life. Everything would be new and exciting. Of course, for Bridget, things aren’t going to be easy or fun, or that just wouldn’t make a good TV show.

This show really needs to find its emotional center, fast. Soapy intrigue and twists are nice, but we need to genuinely care about the characters, eventually. Also, we seriously question Bridget’s decisions and their logic. She does some dumb stuff for dumb reasons. (We explain more about this in the spoiler-y comments.) The show is unoriginal and the dialogue is bad so far. The writers said that they want to be like the Breaking Bad writers, but Breaking Bad’s genius isn’t just in its twists, but in its atmosphere, imagery, foreshadowing, characters, dialogue, and just scene-by-scene precision and excellence. We should really hold off our final judgment of Ringer until seeing a few more episodes though. Pilots can be clunky.

We wouldn’t say this was a great episode, but it does get the ball rolling with lots of action and set-up. We won’t have to wait around and watch things we already know are going to happen when next week rolls by, because the pilot got through most of the exposition early (like most pilots do). It definitely made us want to tune in again to see what happens next, and what more could you really ask for in a pilot? Maybe better special effects on the boat scene, but we don’t care that much about special effects. Maybe a better opera singer in the fundraiser scene? Because that wasn’t pretty and was every negative stereotype people associate with opera, except that the singer was thin and pretty.

Ringer has some big problems that will take talent, effort, and taste to fix. They aren't easy problems to fix either. Just putting five twists in an episode won't make up for everything else being sloppy. We hope the writers were just trying to sell a dumb pilot to the networks, who usually underestimate the viewers' intelligence. We hope they dig deeper next week and in the coming weeks. We really want to like this show and we want it to succeed and get better.

Episode Grade: C+

But it has earned a pass for the next couple of weeks.