Ransom (2017)

There are likely to be more to come on a network that only occasionally fails to keep its crime hours in play for multiple seasons. Ransom is easier to take than some of them, and with a hero who doesn’t have to brandish a gun to get the job done.

It’s not bad television, really. It’s just by-the-CBS-book television.

Ransom needs some stirring. Ex-cop Zara Hallam (Nazneen Contractor, “Heroes Reborn”) rounds out the team, and she gets little to do in this hour, a crime one can only hope will be rectified in future episodes.

Mostly it's just an even more egregiously boring version of all the other CBS police procedurals with their cookie-cutter characters and plots.

What is supposed to bring us back to this series is the prospect of regular doses of hostage-taking and hostage-saving, a sort of clickbait of TV plotting. Is there a bigger cliché in law enforcement television than the "put the gun down," "take your finger off the detonator," etc. standoff?

A "laundry folder" through and through.

It's pretty uninspired even by CBS procedural standards.