Scorpion Television Series: A Review by Warren Bull

 

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Scorpion Television Series: A Review by Warren Bull

The series was created by Nick Santora and based (very loosely) on the life of Walter O’Brien, who was one of the executive producers of the show. Elyes Gabel, Katharine McPhee, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Jadyn Wong, Ari Stidham, Robert Patrick, and Riley B. Smith were the primary actors.

The thesis of the show was that genius Walter O’Brien put together a group of intellectual all-stars with specialties in engineering, Computer hacking, psychiatry, and mathematics to solve complex problems that nobody else could solve. The geniuses’ abilities with human interactions were as lacking as their skills at everything else. To help them interpret the world of people, they hired a waitress who had a brilliant son. They helped her understand him. They also had a “handler” from Homeland Security who could manage weapons and fighting.

Interactions with each other, their parents, and “normal” people allowed for warm-hearted moments and humor. The show debuted in 2014 on CBS and became the most-watched drama that year. In its final season, the fourth year and 99 shows later, it was the least-watched CBS show. It was shown on Monday night and CBS struggled to get viewers for all of its shows on that night.

You can read more at: https://www.looper.com/263818/the-real-reason-scorpion-was-canceled/?utm_campaign=clip

65% of new television shows get canceled during their first year. Scorpion lasted long enough to get syndicated, which means the network sells broadcast rights to other networks and actors get paid when the show is aired.

Reviews were mixed. I found that I enjoyed watching, but not several shows in a row. The problem for the writers, it seemed to me, was to consistently find a sufficiently threatening catastrophe and add a series of complications that had to be overcome while the clock ticked down toward disaster.  I imagine it would be like trying to find villains worthy of Superman.

Some shows could manage lighter fare while dealing with the social insecurities of individual characters. Even when the question was: how will O’Brien ruin a date, there had to be some emergency attached.

The humor was also less than consistently successful. There are a limited number of ways to stereotype nerds.

I enjoyed the show partly from seeing how the writers fought to present fresh ideas. I don’t suggest binge-watching.