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 he one thing that can sink Fox's new TV series "Keen
Eddie" before it even gets a chance to dog paddle is the same thing that
sunk another Fox TV show, "The
American Embassy". It's this: Americans just don't seem to care all
that much about England. Oh sure, England seems like a nice enough place to
visit, and Americans certainly don't mind having the Brits backing us up in a
scrap. Although the country as a whole probably eats too much fried food, and
there's that whole thing about British people not having much of a sense of
humor. And oh yeah, it's rumored to rain quite a lot around those parts. But on
the plus side, at least they're not French.
But the question is, do people actually want to spend an
hour each week watching a rough and tumble American cop chasing quirky English
gangsters straight out of a Guy Ritchie film? The one-hour pilot for "Keen
Eddie", starring Mark Valley as Eddie Arlette, the "keen" fellow
of the title, is a fast-paced drama/comedy that rarely has a serious bone in its
body. And in the end, maybe the show's "look, we're not serious here"
vibe will save it.
The pilot opens with Eddie being tricked by a duplicitous
English brunette into inadvertently helping a truckload of drugs escape New
York. Rightly blamed for the foul-up, Eddie is sent to London, the drugs'
destination, as punishment. In London, Eddie is teamed up with Pippin (Julian
Rhind-Tutt), a well-dressed English cop and, as it turns out, a secret party boy
into swinging, even though he's not married. Eddie also finds the sexy Fiona
(Sienna Miller) living in the loft that Eddie had rented; the loft belongs to
Fiona's aunt, who has no idea Fiona is living there. After a couple of rounds of
personality clashes, Eddie and Fiona agree to share the loft. And oh, Eddie has
a clever dog that enjoys "shagging" Fiona's poor cat.
Fast-paced and breezy, the pilot for "Keen Eddie"
looks like an MTV music video gone horribly awry. Simon West, the episode's
director, throws in every camera trick in the book, so much so that you may
start to get a little dizzy after the first 5 minutes. With only 60 minutes
(plus commercials) to set up its premise and prove Eddie's worth to his London
colleagues, the pilot episode feels like a track meet in every sense of the
word.
"Keen Eddie" has a lot going for it. Creator Jib
Polhemus has set the series on location in London, England, which gives the
series a tourist's fascination. Of course "The
American Embassy" was also set entirely in London, and that didn't seem
to help it any (the show didn't even finish up its first-season run). It remains
to be seen rather American audiences will appreciate being taken to England's
seedy underbelly each week (but not so seedy that the whole thing becomes
serious, natch).
The series' "more comedy than drama" vibe is
bolstered by a scene where Eddie and other cops storm a souvenir booth as a
soccer announcer rambles away in voiceover as if the whole sequence was a soccer
game. Also, Mark Valley's Eddie seems to be "in" on the joke, as well
as Colin Salmon as Eddie's new boss, a man lacking in a sense of humor, or so it
seems. The romantic tension between roommates Eddie and the young and beautiful
Sienna Miller is also a definite plus. What is it about gorgeous British women
and those accents?
Finally, these are the two main obstacles in the way of
"Keen Eddie": one) American audiences may not be all that interested
in England, and two) Quirky British gangsters went out of favor along with
one-gimmick director Guy Ritchie and his aging wife, what's-her-name with the
torpedo bras.
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