Deception- Season 1, episode 1

By 2ndteam at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons

Pilot- Our first thought when we turned this show on was, "Oh no, not another one." This show instantly reminded us of Revenge, and it was like another network was trying to imitate its success. Fortunately, it's a little different in tone. It's marginally less melodramatic and a tad more realistic so far. No one does karate, thank the Lord. There's already more emotion and life in the secondary characters than there was in Revenge at this point. If the show keeps up this level of quality, we are going to like it better than we do Revenge.

We love that another black girl has a lead role in a drama pitched at all races. It's about time this started happening. Even rarer, her current love interest is also black. We remember reading something about how, in mainstream movies, black people have to date white people, or the movie comes off as "only for black people." That's stupid. But then we examined the movies we've seen that were NOT made by Tyler Perry, and it's kind of how things turn out. Not so much here. So the liberals inside of us are happy with this show. Still, we're not sure Meagan Good is the best actress and her eyebrows are already driving us nuts.

Onto more important things. This isn't social studies. Who is the murderer? Well, it's not going to be Edward. It's never the first suspect. Also, we kind of like Edward. He's very direct and he seems smart. As long as he was really innocent of that rape thing though. We just hope it's not the dad. That would be too much like another famous murder mystery show (if you don't know what we're talking about, shame on you). Also, we love Victor Garber and don't want to imagine him being a bad dad after we sat through five seasons of Alias. We're glad the baby mystery was solved quickly.

Julian is hot, and we love Mia already. Let's just hope the show doesn't make her just another sad party girl brat like so many other characters we've seen. It's good for a pilot, but we don't need another teen like that girl in Ringer. Ugh. Our first impression is that there are enough characters to get a good soap going. We'll check back in four weeks (by episode five) to tell you if it's still good. We've been burned by pilots before (we're looking at you, Smash). The mystery needs to be solved by season one, and a new plot needs to emerge, like on Veronica Mars, or we're going to be pretty irritated.

Episode grade: B+