I really liked the first season of Sleeper Cell, and the new season begins on Showtime tonight.
Here is the Hollywood Reporter review that seems to indicate an even better season this time around.
Oh cool! I liked the first season too. Fingers crossed that they’ll skip the romance this time though.
I’m looking forward to this. And thanks for the link. Until I read it, I didn’t realize that they aren’t doing the usual thing of running a new episode every week. Instead, there’s a new episode every night until December 17.
Isn’t that how they did the first season? I can’t remember.
Thanks, Dmark.
Do you get kickbacks from Showtime? I just signed up again. 
Not as I remember. And it’s definitely not how they’re showing Dexter. My guess is that they don’t want to be running episodes during Christmas, because no one will be watching.
I just checked IMDB, and it looks like they did show it that way. Original air dates for the 10 episodes were from December 5 through 20. Looks like they skipped the weekends.
Good first episode. You could feel Darwyn’s pain.
Wasn’t that Aasif Mandvi – from The Daily Show?
My On Demand has all eight episodes available so I can burn through them all in a day, which I’ll probably end up doing. I liked the ep OK. The whole good cop bad cop routine was painfully obvious, as was the tea in the face routine. Interesting twist with Darwin being voted Most Popular Boy In The Cell on his second day.
The seems to become entrapment rather than investigation to me.
Entrapment under US law would require that the law enforcement agent induced a person who was not otherwise inclined to break the law to engage in an illegal act. Since everyone in the cell is already predisposed to commit crimes, entrapment isn’t an issue on its face. How far Darwin can go in this may be an open question, which may be where some of the drama will come from.
“Golly, Darwin, what shall we do?”
“I think we should all go down to the police station and turn ourselves in, telling the nice policemen all about our accomplices. It’s what Allah wants us to do.”
OK, so I burned through the rest of the series on On Demand last night. I won’t say much about episodes that haven’t aired in the regular timeslot, but I will say that 1) this series is better than the first and 2) Omid Abtahi is teh hot.
Geez-o-peter, how dumb are those people? If I knew Farik’s “safe house” was wired, why couldn’t the FBI figure it out? Darwyn’s so stupid for trusting his handler again.
At this point, I’m only watching for Farik.
Ya’ll reckon that
Farik will be sent to another country to be tortured, he will escape or bribe his way to freedom and become a danger to Darwyn?
<sing-song> I know something you don’t know! </sing-song>
Yeah…
Having just watched the 8th episode I must say it was ultimately a rather dissapointing and somewhat unrealistic ending, only setting us up for a 3rd season… :rolleyes:
[spoiler]Agreed. I haven’t heard whether a third season is in the offing (which, come on, the same guy infiltrates three cells in a matter of months? That’s 24-level shattering of disbelief) but that was pretty blatant. Overall I thought this series was much more tightly structured than the first series and the dangling ending just felt hollow. Nothing wrong with the notion of Darwyn and Farik having their dramatic showdown but that could’ve been about 25% shorter and been much stronger.
But, at least they killed Gayle so if there is a series 3 we won’t be burdened with her again. Yay dead Gayle![/spoiler]
I’m frustrated by this show because I want to like it, but it just doesn’t come close to the quality of HBO’s series like The Sopranos, Deadwood, or my personal favorite, The Wire. It’s waaaaayyyy too Hollywood, and not realistic enough.
It’s late, so I’ll only mention two major flaws from last season that they are idiotically repeating this season. First, the romantic interest. Last season it was idiotic that Darwyn would start up a relationship while on an undercover mission. This season it’s even more idiotic that the girlfriend is being actively brought into the case by his case agent.
Second, the places where Darwyn meets his agent. Last season it was a porn shop. This season it’s a strip club. So a supposedly devout Muslim is regularly visiting a strip club where he and his FBI contact are seen by the same couple of strippers every time. What’s wrong with this picture?
And tonight, idiocy upon idiocy, the two of them are in a space separated from the rest of the strip club by a cloth divider, arguing at the tops of their lungs about the RDX explosive that Darwyn has obtained and how each of them is fucking up the mission. Yeah, by yelling loudly enough to be heard at the mosque across town.
If only this show had one tenth of The Wire’s realism, it might be worth watching. I keep hoping it will get better, but it just keeps pissing me off.
There’s a very important reason why they have to meet at the strip club.
Otherwise there’d be no way to exhibit the Showtime-required Minimum Breasts per Hour (MBH).
As for Gayle getting drawn into the plot, that’s reasonable for me. The new case agent is a complete bastard and he doesn’t trust Darwyn any more than Darwyn trusts him so he’s looking to shoot every angle. That he’d seek out Gayle as an alternate information source is completely consistent with his character.
I don’t like the Darwyn-Gayle romance either. It’s unrealistic. I think writers add it not just for the spice (nudity) but because they think women won’t watch male-oriented crime or adventure drama unless there’s a romance.
The other thing that bugs me is the killing of the meat shop guy. Shouldn’t the other cell members be checking for news about this? And if the killing/disappearance isn’t on the news, shouldn’t they be suspicious that it’s not? Local businessman disappears?
I see that Michael Ealy was nominated for a Golden Globe. I don’t understand it, because the part is pretty one-note.
Won’t they notice that the RDX packages have been tampered with? Darwyn had to slice each one open. I know I could always tell when the kids messed with Christmas presents.