Monsters of Television

“God said the doomed lose the right to be redeemed.”

Jacob looks way different.

Oh yes, we’re going to talk about Mercy.

TVByTheNumbers calls this show (along with Trauma) a ratings sinkhole. Even with NBC’s desperate need to fill the holes in its schedule, for all intents and purposes, it can’t in good conscience keep a show no one is watching. I watch a lot of TV and I count on one hand the times I’ve caught even a piece of an episode. In fact, the only two full episodes I’ve watched are the two most recent (though I’ve seen several episodes 30 minutes in). But I think I have a pretty decent snapshot of the show.

In the interest of full-disclosure, I had this series pegged for early cancellation from the beginning. Everything from the preview trailers showing Veronica shouting “I’m a nurse that knows more than all of your residents combined” to the cartoonish Dr Dan Harris (seriously, he belongs somewhere on Scrubs) made me believe no one would care. But the small glimmer of hope I held was that they would focus on Veronica’s PTSD. Every indication from advertising showed her struggle with the effects of war and her ravaged psyche and emotions. But I hadn’t seen anything that supported that hope outside of a few irrational moves (dropping a cinderblock on a Harris’s windshield) and her being overly emotional.

What I was expecting was the kind of hallucinations and erratic behavior demonstrated by Gregory House. I wanted a pain we could see and a woman wrestling with herself demonstrated creatively. Perhaps that was my error, taking the standards of one show and demanding it exist in another, despite different disorders and symptoms entirely. “I Have a Date” would show me something else.

The episode started off like all the others I’d caught glimpses of. Despite Veronica being the center of all the advertising, the story is really about her and her two friends, also nurses (though not from the war). The show bounces between the three so much that, even if there was a creative vision for showing it, there isn’t enough time to develop Veronica’s pain in the episode. In fact, often times, Veronica is completely unlikeable and the other nurses are a relief. You start to think the Chloe (the small-town girl living in the big city) could probably take the show over like Scrubs crossed with That Girl. Sofia is sadly marginalized; the only thing I know about her character is that she’s involved with a cop and that relationship is tumultuous. On top of that, they try to develop every other character on the show so that no one has enough screen time to allow any kind of emotional connection. So far, nothing new. The ending, however, arched an eyebrow.

Veronica’s story puts her in the bathroom of a donut shop as she gets ready for her date that night. While she’s in there, a guy comes in and tries to rob the place, shooting the clerk (who bleeds out) and eventually tries to use Veronica as help to find the code to the safe. By the end, Veronica has no choice but to take the store’s gun (hidden under the counter) and defend herself, killing the perp. She calls it in to 911, calmly and in detail. Then, shoeless, she walks out of the donut shop and into the night. It doesn’t sound like much but after shooting the man, Veronica turns into a husk of a person, her eyes vacant, her face stoic, and she leaves before anyone can arrive to help. Shots of her date being stood up indicate she doesn’t continue with her evening as planned. It was an impressive scene and the previews for the episode airing after the Olympics led me to believe they were actually going to take the perspective I thought they would: Veronica goes missing, led by a hallucination of the man she killed, and the rest of the cast tries to find her.

Not that I was looking for a Lost-like storyline where Veronica can suddenly see dead people guiding her toward her destiny. Veronica is not Hurley (or Miles for that matter). I was looking for something akin to House or Six Feet Under or Providence even except that the visual representation of guilt and painful loss in those shows would be guilt within an already unstable mind in Mercy.

The beginning of “I Did Kill You, Didn’t I?” is promising. She wakes up in her car, parked at a gas station. After she changes in the gas station bathroom (apparently preferred to her bathroom at home), she finds the man she killed next to her. The man (to whom she tells that she doesn’t want to know his name) guides her to drinking (which, since she’s from an alcoholic family, she has quit) and eventually tries to convince her of how much of a burden she is, how she will never be loved, and, though never said directly, insinuates she needs to shuffle from this mortal coil. Clearly, the man is her own insecurities and unstableness visually manifested but it’s done creatively enough that it doesn’t hit the casual viewer over the head with the metaphor.

I’d hoped this event with Veronica would collapse some of the myriad threads of this show into the pit of her despair. This is a show that lacks focus and, I prayed, this A-story would start to consolidate things a little as she is the common piece to every character. Instead, we get another storyline of a bombing on a bus (which probably could have stood alone — it’s a little too strong to be a B-story) and a “life goes on” message to the audience. Yes, Veronica is missing and, yes, characters at the hospital incessantly mention that they are thinking about her but everyone still has a job to do and their own problems to take care of. While in theory I kind of like the approach, in practice it just steals drama from Veronica’s story, which consequently doesn’t get enough screen time.

Veronica, as you would imagine, doesn’t off herself but ends up in the arms of Mike (ex-husband), the impact of the scene, one that potentially would be emotional, is diluted by the overpowering B-story and the less-significant issues other characters are having. The preview next week also shows a Veronica-centric episode where she tries to mask the crazy, thereby creating chaos and havoc. It looks good but, if the show keeps up with this “give everyone some screen time approach,” the episode will suffer a muted fate.

The bus bombing story features a kid who heard a voice in his head that he attributed to God. He mentions that those that choose the wrong path forfeit redemption. For a show that lacks focus and sacrifices emotional connection for telling as many stories as possible in each episode, perhaps it has forfeited the right to a second season, even with all the holes NBC has to fill. If it doesn’t make it, I’d almost like to see a rebooted version of this series. I’m looking at you, CBS. I mean, if you have the scruples to make The Mentalist, you can make a fake Mercy, too.

Also: with all that being said, James Van Der Beek is the best thing this show has ever done. CBS, when you remake it, kill off Harris and keep Briggs. The scene where he wrestles the gun from the kid is the best acting he’s ever done.