Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jett’ On Cinemax, Where Carla Gugino Is An Ex-Thief Drawn Back Into A Life Of Crime By Giancarlo Esposito

People forget that Carla Gugino came to most people’s attention as Michael J. Fox’s loyal wife in the first season of Spin City; her role not only got written out in the middle of the first season, her scenes were cut from the show’s reruns. In the almost quarter-century since, though, she’s made a career playing sexy femme fatales, gritty antiheroes, and smart cookies who know what they want out of life. Her latest role, Daisy “Jett” Kowalski, incorporates all three aspects. Read on to find out more about Jett…

JETT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Two guys sit in a vintage muscle car, staking out a brownstone across the street. They’re talking about how one of them ended up wearing the bathing suit of their boss when his wife invited him into the pool for a dip (i.e. sex).

The Gist: These two guys wait for a wife to send her husband to work, then bust in, take the woman hostage and shoot the guy she’s sleeping with — a jujitsu instructor that neither of them expected to be there.

Two weeks earlier, we see a woman get out of a cab, walk into her house and put her face in a bowl full of ice. The woman is Daisy “Jett” Kowalksi (Carla Gugino), a master thief who has just been paroled. She’s living at home with her daughter Alice (Violet McGraw) and nanny/”friend” Maria (Elena Anaya). When she lopes into her room after her night out, she’s confronted by two thugs who want her to snap handcuffs on her sometimes-side piece, crime boss Charlie Baudelaire (Giancarlo Esposito) so they can ask him some questions. She complies, but it turns out that it was a setup; Charlie’s son Junior (Gentry White) kills the thugs.

Or does he? It was actually a test for Charlie, who needed to figure out if Jett is still trustworthy. He wants her to steal a ring from the safe of an Eastern European crime boss Miljan Bestic (Greg Bryk), who lives in Cuba. It’s worth a half a mil to her, but she won’t do it unless he springs her favorite safe cracker, Quinn (Mustafa Shakir); they also have a checkered romantic history, which they return to as soon as he’s sprung (that’s why Charlie’s guys are outside of that woman’s house; she was the wife of the corrections officer they’re going to use to spring Quinn).

The two of them live it up in Havana until its time for Jett to use her seduction skills to get Bestic to show her the layout of his compound. In an extended scene, she and Quinn manage to get the ring, but Quinn sees something that makes this whole job very wrong.

Our Take: We want to dislike Jett. There’s a whole lot about the show, produced, written and directed by Sebastian Gutiérrez (who has used his longtime squeeze Gugino to good effect in his movies), that is grating. The dialogue can be funny at times, especially when Charlie’s two hitmen react to having a naked jujitsu instructor pointing a gun at them, but is too clever for its own good. There are too many characters in the first episode that don’t have a lot to do. Sequences like the one where Quinn is busted out of prison last far too long.

But, in one of those cases where the actors outstrip the writing, we like Jett because we’ve loved watching Carla Gugino for twenty years, especially during her mid-career phase as a strong, antihero-esque lead. Gugino can play that role like few others right now, and she makes Jett Kowalksi a person to follow and we root for her to be able to retire to a life of being a bartender and mom. Watching how much she reveled in her job seducing Bestic, we believe that the only reason she wanted to retire is just so she could stay out of prison.

And the cast is chock full of fine performances, not the least of which is Esposito, who makes Charlie only slightly less menacing than his signature role as Breaking Bad‘s Gus Fring; we also like the limited scenes, including a flashback, of Michael Aronov as Jackie Dillon, an undercover cop who met Jett twelve years ago on a case.

The performances make the first episode, which is bloated by at least 15 minutes, fun to watch. But Gugino takes the cake; she’s fun, charming and sexy while showing the weariness Jett has over having to go back to doing the work that sent her away from her family in the first place.

Sex and Skin: We see full frontal on the naked jujitsu instructor, as well as lots of sexy times between Jett and Quinn.

Parting Shot: Things have gone terribly wrong for Jett and Quinn by the end of the episode. That’s all we’ll mention.

Sleeper Star: Gentry White as Junior is intriguing because he feels he’s in charge of his father’s organization, or at least wants to be, and a scene between him and Quinn reveals that. But he’s also involved in the reason why things in Cuba go very wrong.

Most Pilot-y Line: Jett’s cover to Bestic is that she’s an actress playing Ava Gardner in a movie Quinn has written. All the dialogue about Ava Gardner might be interesting to a movie buff, but would likely bore regular viewers to tears.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Jett shines because of Carla Gugino, despite a first episode that leave a lot to be desired.

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.

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