Awake S01E01-02 (NBC, 2012)

I used to get Jason Isaacs mixed up with Timothy Dalton heaps back in the day. Smartypants out there might point out that it was Isaacs who did a lot of villain roles before transitioning to goodie-goods, while it was the reverse for Dalton. Whatever.

All of which has very little to do with Awake, a tidy police procedural that tries to meld the cool stuff from Memento and Matrix (without the sci fi garble), all in a post-Life on Mars (UK) zeitgeisty capture-lightning-in-a-bottle (and hope you don't fry) kind of way. Unfortunately, the show fails terribly - not miserably, just terribly - through adhering to a mystery-of-the-week ethos that constrains suffocates the dreams and possibilities of the show into a 45-minute slog of bullshit TV-cop-show blah, admirably accurate TV psychology talk, and too-fucking-convenient-to-fucking-swallow detective work.

Maybe it's just my anti-Americanism, but the celebration of consequence-free I-want-my-cake-and-eat-it-too just sticks in my craw.

Love your work, Jas' - let's have some more of that Case Histories soon, eh?