Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
ABC has been one of the few networks who have repeatedly rolled the dice on cable-style limited series in the past few years, mostly via the three seasons of the anthology series American Crime. This time, they mix up the formula a bit, going away from crime stories with a social bent to a straight-up abduction story where pretty much everyone but the child who was taken has skeletons in the closet that they don’t want coming out. Let’s see if Kyra Sedgwick’s latest drama, Ten Days in the Valley, is compelling enough to stick with for ten episodes.
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 desperate to get that hour 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 Ten Days in the Valley cast who is not the top-billed star 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.
TEN DAYS IN THE VALLEY
Opening Shot: We see a ethereal view of Los Angeles, then we push in on a Jane Sadler (Sedgwick) breathing in and out as she meditates. Then a card that says “Day One” appears on the screen.
The Gist: Sadler is a filmmaker who’s running a new TV cop show that’s supposed to be realistic and gritty. But she’s basically in the Aaron Sorkin mode, doing all the writing 24/7, keeping herself going via various substances. On the personal side, she’s struggling with her ex-husband Pete (Kick Gurry), constantly arguing with the recovering alcoholic over his rights to see their daughter Lake (Abigail Pniowsky).
One rainy night, where she’s forced to do overnight rewrites to a scene, she leaves Lake in her bed and goes to her office, in a shed next to the house. A combo of wine and Ambien has her groggy, so she calls her dealer to deliver her a pick-me-up: coke. She wakes up in the middle of the night after writing the scene and goes to the house, only to see all the doors locked and Lake missing.
She assumes Pete took her, but the lead investigator, LAPD Detective John Bird (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) finds out otherwise. As Sadler’s story of the night falls apart, he trusts her less, knowing that she made a documentary that pretty much took down the leadership of San Diego’s police department. Her half-sister Ali (Erika Christensen) tries to help Sadler cope, but all Sadler does is try to throw herself into work, where her head writer Matt Walker (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) is already thinking she’s incapable of running the show. Add to that the fact that the source she used for the show’s material is getting skittish that she’s not changing enough details, and you can start to see why Sadler might snort a line every once in awhile.
Our Take: Ten Days in the Valley has the production values of a Big Little Lies-ish limited series, and Sedgwick does a fantastic job as the overburdened, overworked Sadler. But here’s the problem: there’s just way too much going on in the first episode. Everyone has a dirty secret they need to hide, including Sadler. Even her gushy assistant Casey (Emily Kinney) and her 7-day-a-week nanny Beatriz (Marisol Ramirez) have something going on. It’s just too much.
So far, the only real nuanced character is Sedgwick’s. Everyone else is a caricature: the snively ex-husband who won’t follow the rules of the custody agreement, the in-control sibiling, the nanny who’s really the mom to Lake, the cynical cop who’s been trained to not trust anyone.
The message that the show might be trying to convey, about how tough it is for working mothers to “have it all”, gets lost in the fact that Jane Sadler copes with it by leaving her 8-year-old alone in the house to write by candlelight, guzzle wine and do coke. Not a great example, is she?
Sex and Skin: We find out near the end of the episode that Pete and Casey (if that’s her name) are having a secret affair. The scene is relatively chaste, but it also shows that there is much more going on than meets the eye.
Parting Shot: Lake is sleeping in an unfamiliar room, and someone off-camera is reading her a book. She hates the book; it’s not one of the ones she reads with her mom every night. She still thinks she’s on a sleepover somewhere, so the implication is that she knows her captor… but for now, we have no idea.
Sleeper Star: Hopefully, we’ll see more of Pniowsky as Lake. She plays a real 8-year-old who knows that things with her parents aren’t great. We want to see how she reacts to the life-threatening situation she’s in by the end of the episode.
Most Pilot-y Line: “Mother of the year, Jane! Mother of the year!” Pete keeps yelling that after they get into a physical confrontation over the kidnapping, with Det. Bird putting him in cuffs in order to defuse the situation.
Our Call: SKIP IT. We’re saying this reluctantly, because it’s presented as high-quality prestige-style television, and we’re big fans of Sedgwick. But surrounding her character, who we’re not even sure we like at this point, are a bunch of cliches that are straight out of the “kidnap show era” of 2006. You don’t need to have everyone hiding a secret to make a compelling show, the ten days this show will cover may not be enough to service all these stories.
(Click to see all of Decider’s complete Stream It or Skip It reviews)
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.
