Fiction is full of criminals who lead double lives, but Angelo Doyle (Patrick Dempsey) takes this to the extreme. By day, Angelo is a suburban salesman mourning the death of his wife and helping his daughter Maria (Odeya Rush) prepare for the birth of her first child, all while wearing a zip-up vest that screams "boring dad." But when it's time for his real job, Angelo transforms. He takes off the vest; he puts on his custom-made Italian suit. He parks the minivan in a dilapidated-looking garage where he swaps it for a Porsche. And Angelo drives to New York City, where he gets paid to kill people.
What makes Angelo's situation so unusual is that he not only hides his work from his family, but also his family from his work. Angelo's contact, Dutch (Michael Imperioli), a chef somehow connected to the underworld, has no idea that his former schoolmate ever got married, let alone that he's a widower. Dutch does know about Angelo's brother, Michael (Richard Clarkin), who is in a nursing home with advanced dementia, but only because his existence predates the separation. Only when Angelo begins to show the first symptoms of the same disease that has left Michael unable to speak in complete sentences does the rigid, long-standing division between his two worlds begin to crumble.
Creators: Ed Whitmore, Tracey Malone
Stars: Patrick Dempsey, Odeya Rush, Richard Harmon
Fiction is full of criminals who lead double lives, but Angelo Doyle (Patrick Dempsey) takes this to the extreme. By day, Angelo is a suburban salesman mourning the death of his wife and helping his daughter Maria (Odeya Rush) prepare for the birth of her first child, all while wearing a zip-up vest that screams "clueless dad." But when it's time for his real job, Angelo transforms. The vest comes off; the custom-made Italian suit goes on. The family car is parked in a derelict-looking garage where he swaps it for a Porsche. And Angelo drives into New York City, where he gets paid to kill people.
What makes Angelo's situation so unusual is that he not only hides his work from his family, but also his family from his work. Angelo's contact, Dutch (Michael Imperioli), a chef who is somehow connected to the underworld, has no idea that his former schoolmate got married, let alone that he's a widower. Dutch does know about the existence of Angelo's brother, Michael (Richard Clarkin), who is in a nursing home with advanced dementia, but only because his existence predates the separation.
Only when Angelo begins to show the first symptoms of the same disease that has left Michael unable to speak in complete sentences does the rigid, long-standing division between his two worlds begin to crumble. “Memory of a Killer” was developed by Ed Whitmore and Tracey Malone and inspired by the 2003 Belgian film “De Zaak Alzheimer,” which was itself adapted from a novel. (Aaron Zelman and Glenn Kessler are the showrunners.) However, unlike “Best Medicine,” another Fox midseason premiere adapted from an international title, “Memory of a Killer” fails to translate its intriguing premise into the language of American television. Disjointed and bland in the two episodes provided to critics in advance, this crime drama suffers from some execution problems.
For starters, Dempsey convincingly portrays only one of Angelo’s two facets. The actor formerly known as McDreamy plays the forced, optimistic cheerfulness of a man suppressing his pain well enough, but when it comes time for Angelo to reconnect with his Italian roots and his ties to the mafia, he seems uncomfortable, especially opposite a legendary “Sopranos” actor like Imperioli, who essentially plays a version of his character from that show.
Angelo's targets and adversaries are a succession of generic organized crime clichés: the mob accountant; a Chinese-American gangster. With the exception of a hand-to-hand combat sequence in an elevator, his exploits lack any real intrigue.
The great Gina Torres is a welcome presence as an FBI agent investigating a shooting that brings the violence of Angelo's profession to his own doorstep. (Apparently, it took the mysterious assailant only a few days to figure out what his family and friends couldn't for many years.) Even so, her presence isn't enough to prevent the series' criminal elements from feeling as superficial as the character development. Angelo's wife died in a hit-and-run accident before the events of the series, and it feels as though she was written out to spare the writers the effort of imagining this stubbornly shallow character in a long-term intimate relationship.
A series should never be dismissed entirely based on just a few episodes, not even with a start as unpromising as "Memory of a Killer." The rest of the season could delve deeper into Angelo's backstory to explain how he got into this situation, or use his illness as a way to reflect on his choices and regrets. However, at least initially, the drama is a disappointingly bland version of its original premise. Angelo may be a killer, but the series he stars in definitely isn't.
"Memory of a Killer" premieres on Fox on January 25 at 10:00 p.m. ET, with subsequent episodes airing weekly on Mondays starting January 26.
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