Christopher Gorham and Piper Perabo, courtesy NBC Universal
COVERT AFFAIRS
Friendly Rating: Upper elementary and older.
Safety Rating: Some sexy disrobing and bed scenes, a fair amount of shooting and blood.
Quality Rating: Good, not great.
Series premieres tonight on USA Network at 10 p.m.
Covert Affairs – surprise, surprise – is your basic cop show about the CIA – and I don’t mean Culinary Institute of America. As seen through the eyes of young trainee Annie Walker (Piper Perabo), the Central Intelligence Agency is one of those places where nothing is as it seems, two of the bosses are married to each other and feuding and the bad guys do an awful lot of shooting. Like we haven’t seen any of that before.
Safety-wise, this is a 10 p.m. show, so the opening features flashbacks of Annie and the man of her dreams enjoying each other’s company with sultry scenes of Annie removing her bikini top an so forth. Then there is the scene where the bad guy gets a bullet in the head, with lots more to follow. In short, it’s violent, but not as bad as it could be.
As for how good it is, well, the show is on the good side of competent. It’s a little predictable, but not terribly so. The character of Auggie (Christopher Gorham – Betty’s former love interest from accounting, if you remember Ugly Betty) is an interesting twist. He is vision-impaired, having lost his sight on the job. He’s not bitter, but he’s not altogether believable, either. What I can’t figure is why they couldn’t have found an actor who is genuinely blind to play the role. Maybe the character would have made more sense then.
If you’ve got some older pre-teens wanting to cut their teeth on more grown-up fare, this might be okay with supervision. There are worse ways to waste an hour of your time. The problem for the show is that there are also better ways to waste an hour, if you know what I mean.
