Well, good. I tuned in the first week expecting to find it unwatchable, but I actually liked it. Maybe Fox will give it a whole season to establish a solid fan base and not just yank it before the first sweeps week.
I like the show. The only problem I can see happening is what effected the X-Files; ie. no resolution. If this show goes on season after season and J Doe finds information about himself, only to have it taken away, it will get very irratating…
So far though, I think it’s great.
This guy knows everything. Everything. And what does he do with it? Every week, he helps the police solve another crime. Yay. The concept’s great, but they’re not doing anything with it. I wish they’d ditch the NYPD Blue crap and try for something original.
Oddly enough, UPN’s Haunted has a guy with supernatural powers solving crimes, but this one works so much better. Partly because what else are you going to do with the ability to speak with the dead but solve crimes? That or have him go around helping ghosts come to terms with their afterlife, ala The Sixth Sense, but in a TV format, I think that would turn into something glurgy like Touched by an Angel.
Still, I really hope the show is successful, because the audience might bleed into the show’s lead-in, the superb Firefly. And anything that keeps Firefly on the air is a Good Thing in my book.
I have been taping it every week, so far, along with Firefly. (I’m rarely home on Friday nights any more.) This week, I cut back to just Jon, since Firefly is almost entirely unwatchable. I just hope that Firefly dies quickly, and gives JD a better time slot. 
Wow. Not to be a wet blanket, but during the episodes I watched I couldn’t imagine anyone liking this show. The performances were uniformly awful, especially the lead character’s. And unforgivably corny scenes like when he grabs the hot dog vendor by the lapels and says “I know the things I’m not supposed to know but I don’t know the things I’m supposed to know!!”
But my biggest problem was the writing. The entire show is based on the premise that the guy knows everything, which means that the writers are going to have to do their research. But then they show him hacking into some government network and when his friend/assistant asks how he got in, he lets fly with some meaningless jargon along the lines of “I downloaded a viral protocol over the TCP/IP link to the server mainframe.” Come on! Couldn’t they have done like 5 minutes of research, ask one of their IT guys if people who know computers really talk like that? It may sound like a nitpick, but if they so obviously dropped the ball on this, how am I supposed to buy any of the other stuff? It’s just lazy writing.
(That, plus the fact that they show him reciting the phone book from “memory” at the beginning of the show, and then show a long montage of him looking up hotels in the phone book towards the end of the show. Does he know the white pages only?)
Hmmm… I guess this was just to be a wet blanket after all.
I pretty much agree with SolGrundy. The show has been watchable because of the interesting premise, but just barely. The problem is the writing. It’s just not very good. The dialog is contrived, with lots of cliches. And the acting is extremely weak. There’s not a believable character on the entire show. Probably also due to the weak writing.
And if you’re going to do a TV series about a guy who knows everything, you’d better learn how to do it well. This show threatens to become like Star Trek’s trek-speak gobbledegook. Instead of inverting the phase of the dilithium sequence to cause a rift in the space-time continuum in order to get the writers out of a box they’ve written themselves into, John Doe will just use the TCP/IP link to download the viral protocol.
You know what would make the show more interesting? If he did something INTERESTING with his knowledge. How about taking a break from crimefighting to cure cancer or come up with a new unified field theory?
Or how about having him know all the facts, but be kinda stupid? Now that would be interesting - what would it be like for someone with a below-average IQ to suddenly know everything? They have the facts, but can’t put it together… That might be an interesting premise.
But so far, I haven’t been impressed. Pretty standard fare. The show might suffer in comparison to *Firefly, which is on just before and is much, much better.
I watched the first episode and thought it was lame. The concept is interesting, although not necessarily original, and the idea of a black and white world with color clues seemed neat. But John Doe himself seemed a bit too dull and unoriginal.
The second episode I watched, the one last week with the 30 year old murder mystery, was a bit better, in part because John Doe seemed to have changed a bit.
The first episode was “Oh… I do not know who I am…” The last episode I saw seemed a bit more like “i don’t know who i am hehehehehe” With a subtle shift, he went from a brooding everyman super genius to an idiot savant who in secret saves his largest boogers and gives them pet names.
Well, now that the holy TV GUIDE has given its approval, I guess it’s OK to like it now… 
Well, I caught my first episode earlier today and I predicted who killed the museum guard within five minutes. And with my amazing predictive powers, I forsee numerous episode advertisements that promise to reveal the secret of John Doe, but only give vague hints in a dragged out, inconsistant mess that would make Chris Carter blush.
I also guessed immediately who killed the guard and why and where the ring was, but I still liked watching how everything unfolded and learning how the ring got out of the museum afterward. Yes, the writing and premise of the series are flawed, but really–a guy who knows everything except who he is…? Doesn’t that tell the viewer right off that a certain amount of suspended disbelief is going to be required? If I don’t think about it too much, it’s really not a bad show. Better than most of the new ones this season.
I rather like it. I too see a problem that it wil be like the Fugitive. There is basically one big mystery and if it is solved the show is over. I think the cop is resonably realistic.
It needs to feature Stella more (the very good looking computer chick)
Last night I watched Firefly, John Doe, and two episodes of Birds of Prey. (on tape). Am I a geek or what?
Brian
I wouldn’t mind so much that the guy knows everything, except that he knows things that don’t exist. Such as… what card will come up next in Blackjack. 99% certainty that you’ll get a 4??? Flat out nonsense.
I’ve been watching Firefly and Doe, and Firefly is a thousand times better. I think Doe is going to be off my list, it’s too annoying.
The blackjack scene is a perfect example of why the writing on this show is BAD. Not only was his prediction completely wrong, but the math he uttered was total nonsense, and the percentages were out in left field. There’s virtually no way that any single card in blackjack can have a probability of occuring like that. But even worse, they got the game itself wrong. What was that business with everyone pushing all their money into the spot on the second card? Apparently, the guy who wrote that blackjack scene has never actually played the game.
It would have taken a writer maybe half an hour of research on the internet to make that scene far, far, better. It was very sloppy. And getting those details right is very important in a show like this. Half of this show’s charm comes from the fact that this guy knows everything, and it’s important to make that believable. If they had gotten the blackjack scene right, including in the details only gambling geeks like me would know, then it would give me confidence that the other stuff he’s uttering about things I don’t know would be actually close to fact, and that would make the show much more interesting.
Each time they do a little genius-exposition that turns out to be complete nonsense, they’ll lose another chunk of the audience, because all of us are experts in something. As soon as John Doe starts expounding on a subject that you know something about, you’ll get annoyed, and your suspension of disbelief will go out the window.
Plus, it’s just badly written. Does anyone believe that the goth artist with a heart of gold would agree to let a friend with terminal cancer kill herself, then portray himself as a morgue attendant and sneak her out and gut her like a fish? Did anyone buy the coincidence of his female assistant just happening to be shagging her boyfriend in the locked and closed museum building when the murder is committed?
And why does this civilian get to walk into a police station and sit down and start using the computers? Wouldn’t they at least hire him and give him a badge to cover themselves?
I’ve gotta agree with the thumbs-down crowd. It’s a cool concept that’s being undone by awful writing. Scratch that. The premise is pretty bad as well. Can you imagine what a person would be like if he knew everything that had been put into print? He wouldn’t be some kind of genius, he be a blithering idiot.
“According to the January 16 Weekly World News, Bat Boy hangs upside down under a ledge near the scene of the crime. So now all we have to do is locate him and see if he witnessed the murder!”
“According to last month’s issue of Cosmo, I should suggest a three-way with my girlfriend and her best friend!”
“According to the Watchtower…”
“According to Fortean Times…”
“According to Art Bell…”
“According to a white supremacist web site…”
Get my point? With any luck, this show will tank before the first season is over.
I watched the debut of “Firefly” and then watched JD since the promos sounded interesting and hated the first and loved the 2nd.
Note that he was being really overconfidant at the Blackjack table and lost it all. (While the assist. went against his rec. and won.) So he really can’t predict the cards that accurately.
Yeah, I thought that he was going to tell the detective at the museum on the phone: “The guard has the diamond on or in her body, don’t let anybody touch it.” And then the story would unfold from there.
And what happened to William Forsythe (the bartender)? I thought having a big actor like him meant that he would turn out to play a key role. Now he hasn’t appeared in the last 2(?) episodes?
Oh, “Monk” is good too.
Indeed. There is a Prairie Creek, Arkansas, but the only diamond mine in Arkansas (and the United States) is not there but in Murfreesboro. It is not a commercial enterprise, but a state park.
Well I still like it quite a bit, so there.
Then again, I like Survivor so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt.
ps. I liked this week’s episode alot, but next week looks like it will address the origin issue more.
So when did knowing trvia make one a genius?
Since the Trivial Pursuit Genius Edition.
It’s a joke. Shut up.
See, for me the babble is a plus for the show. Since I don’t know anything about sheep framing in Australia or how many people named Joe Benton live in Fumblebuck Louisiana or the source code for Ms Pac-Man so I couldn’t care less if it’s all factually correct. So his little ravings are way funny. Plus I like Grace Zabriske and I also like how John gets naked every once in a while and it’s only an hour a week so who cares?