Minority Report (2015)

If Minority Report is a satisfying stew of crime drama and sci-fi adventure, the seasoning is sly wit.

Science-fiction meets crime-solving buddy drama in an extension of the 2002 movie.

[Minority Report] is on the whole competent, watchable and frequently fun--if entirely predictable.

Minority Report's reverence for the material that inspired it undermines its own attempts to explore and build on the environments and sensibilities it labors so intensely to recreate.

Cut through the window dressing, though, and it’s just another way of putting fresh paint on a procedural.

The show itself, while existing in a sleek future of advanced technology, is a bit clunky. It hews to the most obvious tropes of case-of-the-week shows about oddball visionaries partnered with law-and-order sharpshooters, and in the first hour at least, doesn’t pay its audience much respect when it comes to the plausibility of dialogue, character motivations, or the security procedures at a mental institution for former future-convicts.

Alternately bad and laughably bad, Minority Report is one of the few new fall shows that can probably be fairly judged on the basis of its pilot alone: There are so many things working against it, it’s hard to imagine how the show could be better, even if Fox had sent out more than just its first episode to critics.