She has a clear skill set, albeit one for which the value of all those aforementioned recreational interests is a tiny bit silly, as well as an emotional investment in the life that she and Harry lived before. In Helen, Gonzaga has the series’ only fully developed character, through the four episodes sent to critics. And if you like convoluted secret-keeping, there are still Helen and Harry’s two kids, who barely register so far. But once the show folds her into the team, the overall familiarity of the material makes it hard to get invested. I’m honestly relieved that wasn’t the way they chose to go, since the longer Helen is oblivious to Harry’s secret the more it invalidates the observational traits that will eventually make her a useful member of the team. Maybe there were even - God forbid - some versions that attempted to strategize a modern equivalent for the Bill Paxton infidelity subplot from the movie. Helen, incidentally, is now a community college linguistics professor with an aptitude for languages, tae-bo and yoga, all of which will come in mighty handy when she learns the truth about Harry’s secret identity and VERY quickly becomes a part of his world of espionage and intrigue.ĬBS has been trying to remake True Lies as a series for over a decade, and I have to assume there were versions of the property that attempted to stretch out the revelation of Harry’s secret identity, perhaps to the first season finale or thereabouts. Harry is constantly going off on international jaunts to save the world, but as far as his wife Helen ( Ginger Gonzaga) knows, he’s a boring computer salesman, prone to missing key events in the lives of teenage kids Dana (Annabella Didion) and Jake (Lucas Jaye). Shameless veteran Steve Howey steps into the Arnold Schwarzenegger role as Harry Tasker, an all-purpose spy within the ultra-secretive Omega Sector. What Nix has done is recreate the first act of the Cameron movie (and its French source material, the 1991 film La Totale!), skipped over all the uncomfortable and icky stuff that makes up the middle and leapt ahead to the sequels that we never got - probably because, as this series suggests, those sequels might have run the risk of being borderline generic. The accurate minimization of the series isn’t exactly “cheap,” but it’s definitely “incongruously small.” True Lies is a fizzy throwback that’s closer to something like a Hart to Hart or series creator Matt Nix‘s Burn Notice than to a Hollywood smash translated to the small screen. Paramount+ Is Giving Away Super Bowl Tickets to Subscribers: Here's How to Enter to WinĪs a TV show, CBS’ True Lies is a bottle rocket.
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