Covert Affairs – Season 1

Posted May 25, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

After having been dumped in Sri Lanka by a guy called Ben Mercer, who she fell in love with after three weeks on holiday, Annie Walker has been having issues getting back on her feet. Determined to not get fooled again, she decides to join the CIA. One month before her training is officially finished, she gets sent to Langley in order to do a first field mission and things turn out so well that her bosses decide to keep her around instead of letting her finish her training.

However, what Annie doesn’t know is that there’s a hidden agenda in the CIA, that Ben Mercer is actually a CIA agent gone rogue, and that they’re using her in order to get Mercer back…

Sound and Vision:
The image isn’t bad, but it isn’t perfect either. Certain scenes contain quite a lot of grain, some scenes look like shot with a cheap handycam instead of a professional camera system and this while for instance scenes inside look crispy clean. It’s mostly the difference between scenes that make the lack of coherence in filming apparent. The makers might have done better to make sure there’s one visual style.

On the sound there’s little to complain about. The 5.1 track nicely supports the action going on on the screen, while giving more subtle effects during calmer sequences. Good work.

Extras:
– Deleted Scenes
– Audio Commentary
– Bloopers
– Welcome to the Farm
– Blind Insight
– Set Tour

A rather standard set of extras that doesn’t really offer much interesting besides the usual stuff we get on DVD’s.

Conclusion:
Covert Affairs is a spy show headed by executive producer Doug Liman who was also in charge of The Bourne Trilogy. That sets expectations which unfortunately don’t get fulfilled completely. The show runs rampant of well-known actors from a variety of other shows (Heroes, NCIS, Ugly Betty, The O.C., House M.D., E.R., Invasion, …) but is headed by Piper Perabo who doesn’t really manage to put down a completely believable character.

Also the show itself has some credibility issues. Coincidences happen all too often, events are too predictable and all in all it seems as if the series doesn’t quite know what it wants yet. As if there’s an identity crisis present. This goes from the opening sequence which seems a combination of Chuck and Mad Men, over the funny side character Auggie Anderson who resembles too much Criminal Minds’ Dr. Spencer Reid but with as special feature that he’s blind, to the fact that the series constantly switches between undercover operations and family circumstances without ever truly knowing where it wants to go.

Don’t get me wrong though, this isn’t a bad show. The episodes are just interesting enough to keep you hanging on and wanting to check out the next episode. However, for the second season it’s clear Cover Affairs will need to get its act together and create its own personality as for now it’s like a combination of a more serious version of Chuck combined with Criminal Minds and some average love drama.

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