Stream It or Skip It? ‘Wicked City’

Here at Decider, we’ve committed ourselves to watching the fall pilots for you and reporting back to help you prioritize your viewing using our super-scientific rating system. Below, we tell you everything you need to know about Wicked City.

A Guide to Our Rating System

Opening Shot: The opening of a pilot can set a mood for the entire show (think Six Feet Under); thus, we examine the first shot of each pilot.
The gist: The “who, what, where, when, why?” of the pilot.
Our take: What did we think? Are we desperate for more, or engaging in a desperate, Faustian bargain to get those 43 minutes back?
Sex and Skin: That’s all you care about anyway, right? We let you know how quickly the show gets down and dirty.
Parting Shot: Where does the pilot leave us? Hanging off a cliff, or running for the hills?
Sleeper Star: Basically, someone in the cast who is not the top-billed star (Sorry, Rob Lowe!) who shows great promise.
Most Pilot-y Line: Pilots have a lot of work to do: world building, character establishing, and stakes raising. Sometimes that results in some pretty clunky dialogue.
Our call: We’ll let you know if you should, ahem, Stream It or Skip It.

Wicked City

Opening Shot: The Hollywood sign. Aerial L.A. cityscape shots (Did we accidentally turn on True Detective Season Two?). Kent (Ed Westwick) cruises down Sunset Strip, passing prostitutes with crimped hair and a promotional billboard for Airplane II. Welcome to 1982. Welcome to Wicked City.
The gist: Wicked City revolves around a murder case from 1982 centered on the rock ’n’ roll, cocaine-infused revelry of the Sunset Strip. Police detectives, journalists, drug dealers, and club-goers form alliances in order to expose a serial killer wreaking havoc on the Strip.
Our take: Wicked City had — and still might have — tremendous potential: the time period (the early ’80s) and the setting (the Sunset Strip) are engaging in and of themselves. Unfortunately, these two aspects of the show are the most interesting things about this pilot (the soundtrack is also pretty good, if a bit on the nose — “Tainted Love” pulses underneath the promos and also plays during the pilot). We know it’s the ’80s because the music and Erika Christensen’s hairdo tells us so, but otherwise the delicious and seedy possibilities that the time and place present are, so far, incredibly underutilized. There’s nothing fun about this show. Don’t expect to laugh and don’t be surprised by unrelenting bleakness, over-serious cop chat, and characters as flat as the bathroom counter they’re snorting cocaine on.
Sex and Skin: Two scenes of girls going down on Kent in a car (one ends in murder), some shower sex between Jeremy Sisto’s Jack Roth and a woman who is not his wife, and an extended scene of light BDSM and heavy necrophilia role play.
Parting Shot: Kent and Betty (Erika Christensen) leave the club together, with their next victim in tow. Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” blares. The camera pulls back, then lingers on the Sunset Boulevard street sign.
Sleeper Star: Taissa Farmiga, most notably of American Horror Story fame, here plays Karen McLaren, a young music journalist who gets caught in Kent’s web.
Most Pilot-y Line: “Kill me, I like giving back,” says the serial killer. Twice.
Our call: Skip It. Tune into Fargo, a crime series that isn’t allergic to having a bit of fun.
[Where to stream Wicked City]

Brett Barbour is a writer who lives in Brooklyn and is prone to binge-watching.

Like what you see? Follow Decider on Facebook and Twitter to join the conversation, and sign up for our email newsletters to be the first to know about streaming movies and TV news!