Thoughtcrimes

So I was watching Thoughtcrimes, which is the kind of movie that people only hunt down if they're serious about seeing Everything Favorite Actor X has been in. Navi Rawat now plays Amita on Numb3rs, and, the more common reason for hunting this puppy down, Joe Flanigan now plays John Sheppard on Stargate: Atlantis.

But so I was watching along and the premise is how she's telepathic! He has an eidetic memory! They fight crime! And I thought, "This reads like a pilot." Then I got to the end and saw the USA network graphic and thought, "Oh, so that was a pilot." (Interesting imdb-combing fact: it was two writers' first break-in-the-business effort. They seem to have continued as a writing partnership.) I am kind of sad that it never got picked up: I would have been thrilled to have a couple of seasons of Navi Rawat and The Flan reading minds and kicking ass.

And I asked myself, "Self," I said, "why do you think this pilot was not picked up?"

In all honesty, I do not know why this pilot was not picked up. Maybe somebody somewhere was not offered enough money. Maybe somebody got a gig somewhere else for better money. (I keep wondering where Skiffy lands in relation to USA on an actor's wishlist: they're both cable, they have the same parent company, but Skiffy's genre. But Rawat is working on network TV. That has to be a winner.) Maybe better things were on the table. (In 2003, USA had Monk, Dead Zone, and Peacemakers, a western I recently heard of as being beloved of approximately 8 people.)

But I figured that these might be some of the reasons:

1. The first 22:30 of this movie is dead air. The movie could start when Freya rolls into the big city with her mentor in psychicness and not lose anything.

2. Relatedly, there are several false starts. What is the inciting incident? She's a normal girl who goes crazy! She's a crazy girl who is actually psychic! She's a psychic girl who's just been told the government wants her talents. Yeah, all that is important backstory--that can be glossed in a couple of lines of dialogue and, you know, is. For the viewers who didn't tune in early enough.

3. POV shift. Is this a show about a psychic girl who joins an NSA team? Or is this a show about an NSAgent who gets a psychic girl dumped on him? The moment I was convinced that we'd shifted out of Freya's POV was when they went up to her apartment and we got Brandon's WTF about this amazing space the NSA gave her, rather than, at some earlier point, the WTF Freya should have had about being bought off with a nice place.

4. The incredible civil liberties violation of using telepathy on suspected criminals. Maybe Freya is not the person to think about that--she doesn't really get a choice, she gets to hear people, 24/7, and she's also having issues with will anyone she cares about accept her as she is! But someone should have called this, more than Brandon's personal freak-out about her stomping all over his privacy. Maybe it was something they planned to address later (Freya's sister June was a public defender, and some day Freya was going to tell June what really happened, that she was psychic, so maybe that was going to be June's storyline. But I think it needed a nod. Some kind of, "This will not get us a conviction, obviously, but if we can stop crime from happening I will BLUR THE LINES.")

5. Those Argentinian Muslims. It was like, how many hot spots can we hit in five minutes. I mean, okay, the Indonesian Muslims made mildly more sense, but then you got the Ukrainian in on it and the ex-KGB agent made it just a round of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? See, clearly it didn't matter who the villain was, that was background to Freya and Brandon forming this partnership and fighting crime. But if you cannot come up with a cohesive, sensible case, how can you write a Case of the Week show week in and week out?

ftfisher has been pitching this psychic procedural to me. Clearly these are points to keep in mind.