Commentary

New Network Trend: Daring Duos On Impossible Missions

Three is the customary threshold for declaring a trend in network TV shows, but when two similar shows debut on different networks almost back-to-back, then that qualifies too.

The two shows premiered 10 days apart -- “The Company You Keep” on February 19 on ABC and “True Lies” this week on March 1 on CBS.

While the details of the shows’ scenarios differ in various ways, their overriding similarity is the fact that they are both built around sexy couples involved in complex plots.

In “The Company You Keep,” the two are Charlie Nicoletti and Emma Hill, played by Milo Ventimiglia and Catherine Haena Kim. 

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He is the member of a family of conmen and con-women who have two generations of experience among them in the setting up of elaborate stings. Charlie is the most skilled of all of them.

In the show, Charlie meets Emma in a bar and the chemistry is instantaneous. Before the premiere episode was over, they had both danced the proverbial horizontal mambo to cement their new relationship.

But there is a problem: Neither knows what the other does for a living. He is a conman. She is an undercover CIA agent on the trail of an international arms dealer.

This dealer just happens to be a mark who Charlie and his family were trying to con. Thus, Charlie and Emma are on a collision course. 

The tagline ABC has devised for its promotion of “The Company You Keep” is “All is fair in love and lies.”

The slogan could just as easily be applied to “True Lies” on CBS. This is the new action series that has been adapted from the 1994 hit movie of the same name starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis.

In the TV show, Steve Howey plays Harry Tasker, described as “a first-class international spy” working for a super-secret unit inside the U.S. intelligence apparatus called Omega Sector.

That’s also a similarity between “True Lies” and “The Company You Keep”: Each have characters working as international secret agents.

Harry’s cover story is that he is a salesman for a computer company who often travels for work, sometimes suddenly. 

He has been leading this double life for years, while maintaining what looks like a normal home life of wife and kids.

His wife, Helen Trasker (Ginger Gonzaga), is a mom and community-college language professor who is bored with her daily routine. Her one opportunity for “leisure” is working out and yoga.

The scenario here is: she finds out in the premiere episode of “True Lies” that her husband is not the dull, ordinary salesman she thought he was for 10 years.

She learns that instead, he is a secret agent capable of performing astonishing feats in the business of international intelligence and counter-intelligence.

The two become a daring duo when she suddenly becomes embroiled in a Paris restaurant brawl with a group of toughs who have shown up to harm her husband. 

She enters the fray -- and to her amazement and her husband’s and thanks to her athleticism, she battles the baddies with skills she did not know she had.

Due to various plot twists and turns, she is more or less forced by circumstance to join her husband as a newly trained secret agent.

This is where “True Lies” diverges from “The Company You Keep.” In “True Lies,” the husband and wife are working together in the business of breaking up complex international rings involved in terrorism and weapons sales.

In “The Company You Keep,” the two are also in love, but are not working together at all.

But the point is made: Both shows feature sexy swashbucklers in daring feats of derring-do. Please, network television, can we please have a third one?

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