OK, I loved Highlander. I liked New Amsterdam. I’ve only seen the commercial for this show. Anyone seen it? Do I need another Immortal living through the ages show? Have I been-there-done-that? or is there something more interesting about this one that makes it worth watching?
I saw the first two episodes and enjoyed them immensely. I think it’s very different from Highlander and worth a watch. It has a nice blending of a crime drama and a medical mystery. The characters are all written well and played better, IMHO.
Spoilers for thoughts about the first couple of episodes:
I like the interaction he has with Abraham, and how he’s trying to get past several lifetimes of woe and horror due to his ‘condition’. I like the sherlockian ability to read people, honed over the centuries. I’m certainly going to keep watching.
I’m a little skeptical of him getting his watch back after his first death, but I’ll chalk that up to movie magic. I also want to know what happens to his clothes when he dies. And I would think he’d have come up with a better system for getting Abe to rescue him than hiding in an alley with a pizza box.
But the back-and-forth father/son son/father relationship with Abe is played superbly.
I don’t. Only difference is no swords and cheesy electrical special effects for cutting off heads. I’ll watch it with the missus, but I won’t go out of my way for it.
For the record, I did go out of my way to watch the Highlander series (which was better than any of the movies after the first, even when the writing would get mind-numbingly stupid and even with Ritchie).
Not bad, but the “killing myself to get evidence” trope is going to get old fast. I’m glad he didn’t fall off the bridge, at least.
What happens when he dies in the middle of winter? Hypothermia would kill him before he got to shore, then he’d revive and die again, and again, and again . . .
Doesn’t have to be the river. Apparently he came to in some pool or maybe even someone’s bathtub as Abraham picked him up from a building somewhere.
I’ve watched the first two episodes. Haven’t committed to a series recording yet, but it shows promise. I keep expecting him to strrrreeeeeetch into Mr. Fantastic, though.
I’m kind of amused at how many times he’s managed to die in like, the space of a few days. I guess being immortal would make you kind of careless, but still. I manage to go entire years without dying.
Also, it took me till the end of the second episode to realize the lead wasn’t the same guy as the lead from The Wire.
I’m wondering how many times he’s been picked up walking around naked by NYC cops and how he apparently manages to talk his way out of it.
I think it’s okay, at least. I find it amusing, because Henry Morgan’s immortality is rather similar to mine. I don’t age, and whenever I’m “slain”, my body disappears rather promptly. It usually takes a few days for me to reappear, though, and it doesn’t have to be in a body of water. Another major difference is that I’m not secretive about it; nobody believes me anyway. I wonder if someone heard me talking about or saw me posting about my immortality, and decided to build a cop show around it.
I’m still wondering why he shares a name with a famous pirate with a spiced rum named after him.
It’s a long story…
I caught the third episode on broadcast last night and caught up with the first two on ABC.com (they make episodes available for a short while, for free something like a week and a day past broadcast. It’s great for folks like me with varying work schedules).
I’m enjoying the mix of ME-Sherlock scans-superpower thing so far and hope it keeps up. It helps that Ioan Gruffudd is easy on my eyes, even if I’m not at all sure how to pronounce his name. Mmmmm… do like those dark-haired Celtic men. ::: fans self :::
Anyhow…
For some reason I thought Detective Martinez would find out/be told his secret. Just a few clues, you know, like video of him getting aboard a subway car on which all the passengers died, falling off a roof after being shot, that sort of thing. She doesn’t, so I expect there will, eventually, be some sort of Big Reveal. This will, of course, involve Morgan dying yet again because Martinez won’t believe it unless she sees it with her own eyes, and maybe will still take some convincing.
On the fence as to whether or not I’d want there to be a romance between Morgan and Martinez, or just a friendship. I know, I know… TVland always wants romance, or at least romantic tension, between the two leads if they’re of different genders but just once I’d like to see them pull off a close friendship between a man and a woman that doesn’t involve them having sex.
Not sure about the Adam subplot/arc. Kind of wish they’d introduced it not in the first episode but a few further in. There’s quite a bit of establishing going on anyway in the pilot but, meh, it’s a minor quibble.
I do think at some point Martinez is going to find out about how often Dr. Morgan has been picked up post-skinny-dipping, though, which will require either some elaborate lie or … well, hell, he could just tell the truth in an outrageous manner. Really, I wish writers would do that occasionally. Tell the damn truth in such a manner the speaker isn’t believed:
MORGAN (with sarcasm): “I was fished out of the Hudson stark naked because I had my head chopped off last night and when I die I come back in water. There, now you know.”
MARTINEZ: “I asked for an explanation, not bullshit. Try again, Morgan.”
Definitely has some staying potential but we’ll see if it has legs.
I believe it’s pronounced YO-an or YO-n. And I agree. Mmmm. 
I watched the first episode and it just didn’t work for me. All of the preposterousness of Scorpion and none of the fun.
I probably won’t watch again, but I’m curious. Have they or will they ever explain what the heck happens to his body and his clothes when he dies? That’s the largest hole I’ve ever seen in any plotline - and that takes in a lot of territory.
I was sort of expecting him to die lots each and every episode but actually he doesn’t die at every opportunity - which makes sense, as it’s clear dying REALLY hurts.
For some reason I really like all the stupid, forced double entendres regarding the main characters immortality, where someone mentions something about youth or dying which has a double meaning for the audience, that knows they’re talking to an immortal. And than the main actor gives a little half-nod to the camera.
If they just did it once or twice an episode, I’d find it annoying. But the show is so saturated with them (seriously, there’s at least one per-scene, sometimes more ) that it goes past annoying to being kind of cute.
They just disappear. We see him get hit by a truck and when the driver gets out a few seconds later his body and clothes aren’t there.
Not sure that really counts as a plot hole, its more or less explicitly magic, like his resurrections.
For all you ladies who think he’s hot, you should go to Amazon or whatever and get the Hornblower DVDs he starred in about ten years ago. They were very well done.
I’m a sucker for time travel/immortal shows, so I’ll keep watching it, but it really seems more like Sherlock Holmes than New Amsterdam, and I liked the latter better.
Which makes me really wonder how far the “disappear” effect goes. Let’s say his clothes vanish and don’t reappear. What about his wallet? replacing ID all the time has to be suspicious. What if he’s holding something. If he borrows Martinez’ wallet and swallows a bullet to prove his immortality, does the gun vanish too or will it drop to the ground? If anything he holds vanishes, that could be an interesting plot point - he needs to get rid of the macguffin, but the bad guys are right after him, so he slits his own throat to both get away from the bad guys and get rid of the macguffin.
I think it’s a decent show. Seems like it will be a fun show to watch, but one you can also half pay attention to while you do something else. I like the characters, and I like the chemistry that the two main characters have, but that it’s not super heavy tension that will be a constant “will they or won’t they” situation.
Yeah, this is inevitable. If he’s going out to crime scenes and working with the detective, then eventually one or more of the cops will recognize him. And I think he’d be in the system for being arrested repeatedly. It would have made more sense if it was one of the things that was known about him, like if the assistant medical examiner told the detective that Dr. Morgan is spookily intuitive, doesn’t share much about his life, and is sometimes found wandering around naked and wet and blames it on a drinking problem (or some other explanation).
I was wondering about this stuff too. It would be a pain to frequently have to replace everything in your wallet, and I would think it would make people suspicious that something weird is going on with him.
They do seem to be telling more of his backstory in each episode, so maybe they’ll answer these questions. Regardless, I’m enjoying the show and will probably keep watching it.
You could just Anglicize it to John Griffith…
I went up on YouTube and caught a clip of him saying his name… got it now