To all the television series junkies out there, a new series just came out, CRISIS. The children of America’s elite, who all conveniently school at Ballard High school, are en-route to a field trip. The bus makes its way from D.C. to New York City for the said trip, carrying the sons and daughters of the world’s elite—the daughter of an all-powerful Fortune 500 company CEO, the son of the Pakistani ambassador, the son of the president of the United States of America, etc., etc.—when it enters an enormous (and convenient) cell phone dead zone on a one-lane back road (like the kids of America’s elite would travel on back roads).
Masked men (cliché) hold up the bus, ferry the kids into a truck, and then into a mansion of sorts, where they remain hidden from everyone. The hostage-taker is, inevitably, a wronged former government operative who also conveniently happens to be a parent at Ballard high school. The master hostage taker must now juggle his dual roles of being a parent to his daughter and masterminding the biggest hostage taking operation in America’s history.
Among the parents is Gillian Anderson, playing the head of that Fortune 500 Company, the kind of woman who payed for the school’s soccer field and therefore feels entitled to land her helicopter there. Another is Dermot Mulroney, a seemingly sad-sack divorced dad whose daughter totally ignores him and who gets kidnapped with the kids but is also the master mind of the whole operation and goes to great lengths to exonerate himself like making the kidnappers cut his finger off. Filling out the ensemble is our hero character, a female FBI agent (Rachael Taylor) who also happens to be Anderson character’s sister (they don’t talk), and a newbie Secret Service agent Lance Gross who escaped the initial kidnapping after being shot by his partner who is an accomplice for the kidnappers.
The whole plot of Crisis after that is built around the demands that the kidnappers have on the parents of the children that they have kidnapped and how that influences whether they will be released or not. Gillian Anderson’s character is asked to pay a ransom of twenty million dollars to the kidnappers which she does without the knowledge of her FBI agent sister. The Pakistani ambassador is forced to subdue an intelligence officer at his consulate and use his access card to get into a secure room in his embassy’s basement where he recovers two Prisoners of War for the kidnappers. Crisis is no doubt a riveting series but one that is rife with inaccuracies and predictability. I give it three stars because it is still worth watching in this dull month.
