“No time to chuckle”

Ghosted: Season One

Network FOX

Release Date 1 October 2017

Episodes S01E01 “Pilot”

With Adam Scott and Craig Robinson as the leads in this new comedy, I was interested in Ghosted from the outset. Now you might be mistaken in thinking this is a show about the dating app Tinder and what happens when a date “ghosts” you, but think more literally, you know, as in actual “ghosts”. And aliens, and mutants and whatever else.

Max Jennifer (Adam Scott) is a former Harvard professor, now bookstore clerk, and believes his wife was abducted by aliens. He is a firm believer in the extraterrestrial, a la Fox Mulder and his missing sister. While Leroy Wright (Craig Robinson) is a former LAPD detective, now mall cop, and the “Scully” of the duo (the sceptic). They’re both great, of course, despite the show.

But that’s as far as The X-Files thread runs. Forget government conspiracies and their dogged determination to solve mysteries despite the odds, there’s a whole friggin organisation dedicated to the paranormal, making this more like your typical procedural. Though there is a solid X-Files gag near the end involving a UFO.

This first episode runs at such a lightning pace, in 22 minutes. In the first scene, we’ve barely met our two main characters before they’re kidnapped and introduced to a secret underground organisation (literally called “The  Bureau Underground”).

With its breakneck speed, there was little time to get to know our characters let alone follow the plot or have a chuckle. Something, something parallel dimensions. We blasted through Max and Leroy’s backstories as pure exposition. I hope the future episodes relax and actually give us time to breathe. The trailer below is all footage from this Pilot episode and basically, runs through the entire plot.

I’m thinking Ghosted got subject to pilot-itis and suffered for having to introduce so much in so little time. Here’s hoping they slow it down a little in the episodes to come.