Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: entertainment, fox, lucifer, neil gaiman, television, tom ellis

The Devil Is In The Details – Thoughts On The Lucifer Premiere

This article contains spoilers for the series premiere of Lucifer.

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Last night was the series premiere of Lucifer, the Fox adaptation of the Vertigo Comic series. It debuted with strong ratings coming in second for the night beaten only by its lead-in, The X-Files. The network will be pleased with that. And in an interview recently, star Tom Ellis said that he received some messages from the character's creator Neil Gaiman saying he was pleased with the take on the character. Two very positive things going for the show already.

The third positive thing is Ellis. I agree with Gaiman, his portrayal of the character is wonderful. He lights up the screen and you can believe he is the devil on sabbatical in Los Angeles. He is who he is, doesn't try to hide it and seems almost surprised when someone doesn't just take him at his word that he is the fallen angel. He seems to find humans fascinating, or at least some of them and really wants the bad people to be punished.

Outside of Ellis, the show is just flat. The only thing close to interesting is the detective he teams up with, Chloe Dancer (Lauren German), who is trying to overcome being the daughter of a cop, being a female detective and having appeared nude in a bad movie when she was younger. The problem is that German brings not real energy to the role. She spends part of the episode pushing him away and the rest working with him for no really good reason.

The rest of the cast is all one-dimensional at best. D.B. Woodside plays Amenadiel, an angry angel who should have watched the episodes of Constantine and borrowed some from Manny (Harold Perrineau). Dancer's daughter is typically cute and quirky, her ex-husband it typically a dick (which they out right call him in the episode) and the bartender / bodyguard Mazikeen doesn't get enough screen time to seem like anything but window dressing yet.

And the case they work on together is really nothing more than a vehicle to put the two of them together. It's somewhat easily solved. No really twists, nothing clever. Just a step by step investigation that she probably would have solved on her own… the killer would have been a suspect the moment she saw the news report regardless of what they had found out with Lucifer's help.

In all honesty the pilot felt like someone was handed the Mike Carey written Lucifer comics and told to make a TV series, and the writer decided to use the same mold that created Castle and Forever and squeezed Lucifer in there instead. Ellis can lead this series and I hope the second episode is better than the pilot. German has yet to prove that she can be as engaging as Stana Katic is as Kate Beckett and the rest of the cast needs to become characters quick or Lucifer may be heading back to hell soon that he plans… cancelled television hell.

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