In the new Fox thriller Memory Of A Killer, Patrick Dempsey plays a man who has kept his life as a contract killer separate from his life as a family man, but it’s all being threatened by an even more insidious enemy — early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Opening Shot: A man jogs through the downtown of a small town as jaunty music plays.
The Gist: Angelo Flannery (Patrick Dempsey) is a copier salesman who lives in the bucolic New York town of Hudson Springs. He travels a lot, but he makes time for his daughter Maria Kahn (Odeya Rush), a teacher who is pregnant with the first child for her and her husband Jeff Kahn (Daniel David Stewart). Jeff is an app developer, but is currently “freelancing,” and his lack of income perpetually worries Angelo.
Angelo tells Maria that he’s going to a sales convention in Rochester, but what he’s actually doing is driving to a ramshackle cabin in the woods, switching his VW for a Porsche, changing from his “dad clothes” to a designer suit and dark shirt, and grabbing the weapons he needs for his job in New York City.
In the city, he is Angelo Boyle, contract killer for his childhood friend/restaurant owner/crime boss Dutch (Michael Imperioli). He’s really good at his job, as we see when Dutch’s nephew Joe (Richard Harmon) tells him that the yakuza figure they’re targeting isn’t sitting at the table they planned on. He manages to do the job in close contact, using the rod from a bathroom paper towel dispenser.
He’s also been really good at keeping his lives separate. Dutch thinks he’s a lone wolf with no family, and Maria thinks he’s a copier salesman who travels a lot. While he’s in New York, Angelo visits his brother Michael (Richard Clarkin), who is in a memory care facility. The Alzheimer’s that has withered away most of his brother’s memory is starting to affect him, too, like when he struggles to remember the PIN to disable the alarm at his apartment, or he leaves his gun in the refrigerator instead of putting it in his safe.
And it feels like his worlds might be starting to clash in unprecedented ways. He’s being followed by a guy in a blue pickup, who knows where he lives in Hudson Springs. And Earl Hancock (Ian Matthews), the drunk driver who killed Angelo’s wife/Maria’s mother a few years earlier, has been let out of prison early.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Memory Of A Killer, created by Ed Whitmore and Tracey Malone and inspired by the Belgian film and book De Zaak Alzheimer, has elements of the series The Day Of The Jackal, The Copenhagen Test and Ray Donovan.
Our Take: After watching the first two episodes of Memory Of A Killer, we feel that the showrunners, Aaron Zelman and Glenn Kessler, and their writers are missing an opportunity to make a show that goes way deeper than just a twisty conspiracy thriller. Through those first two episodes, Angelo’s cognitive decline is addressed, but only in small ways, like we mentioned earlier in this review. In another scene, Angelo kills someone on a bridge in the woods, but becomes frantic when he can’t find his car.
Sure, the small things are the indicators that something might be wrong, especially when a person is around Angelo’s age. But the idea is that a man who has impeccably maintained a double life for decades is losing control of that ability because of early-onset Alzheimer’s. How many episodes are we going to have to see Angelo forgetting a PIN or something like that before he really starts to lose track of things, putting Maria and others in danger?
Another thing we noted through the first two episodes is how convoluted Angelo has made his double life, with the “bat cave” cabin in the woods, the different cars, clothes, even hairstyles. It seems like a lot for someone with full cognitive capacity to keep track of; at a certain point, we hope all of that complication falls away as things go on, and the series concentrates on Angelo’s struggle to keep the important things straight in his head.
Until things start going really sideways for Angelo, though, the show feels like a pretty bog-standard conspiracy thriller. Gina Torres comes in during the second episode as FBI agent Linda Grant, who seems suspicious of Angelo and his copier salesman persona, and it seems like there are superfluous characters that make more sense if they’re part of the conspiracy. But we’re not here for a standard conspiracy thriller, which is why we think this is such a missed opportunity so far.
Performance Worth Watching: We weren’t sure Patrick Dempsey could be a convincing hit man, but he does a good job making Angelo look like the ruthless killer he’s supposed to be.
Sex And Skin: On a network show, sex is generally implied, as it is here.
Parting Shot: After Maria’s life is threatened by a shot from a sniper, Angelo runs down the main street of Hudson Springs, chasing the blue pickup he saw earlier.
Sleeper Star: Peter Gadiot plays Dave, a Hudson Springs police detective that may or may not know about Angelo’s double life.
Most Pilot-y Line: Despite all of the other things Angelo does to keep his life separate, he somehow uses the same cell phone.
Our Call: STREAM IT. We still think that Memory Of A Killer has the potential to go in directions other thrillers haven’t, simply because of the cognitive decline Dempsey’s character will be suffering through. But through the first two episodes, there’s not enough of that to make the show feel much different than other conspiracy thrillers of recent vintage.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
