tek's rating: ½

Take Two, on ABC
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Caution: potential spoilers.

Rachel Bilson plays an actress named Sam Swift, who played a police detective on a TV show called "Hot Suspect" for eight seasons, until the show was cancelled. ("Take Two" was created by a couple of the people behind the series Castle, which was also cancelled after eight seasons. And this show is obviously going for a similar vibe.) Around the time her show was cancelled, Sam's fiance left her, and she dealt with the double blow by getting seriously high on drugs and alcohol. That led to her doing some inappropriate stuff, which apparently was recorded and uploaded to the internet, which tanked her career. It also led to her going to rehab. The series begins when she gets out, and wants to get back to acting. Her agent, Sydney, has trouble finding any work for her. However, there is one movie offer in which she'd be playing a private eye. So, Syd calls in a favor from an ex-boyfriend of hers named Eddie Valetik, who is a P.I. He himself used to be one of the best in the business, but has since fallen on hard times. (We eventually learn that's because of an incident that caused him to start turning down a lot of jobs.) He has an assistant named Roberto "Berto" Vasquez, who handles tech stuff for him. Anyway... Eddie very reluctantly allows Sam to shadow him, to learn what real private detectives' work is like. In the course of their first investigation together, Sam proves surprisingly helpful, having learned a fair amount about detective work from her show. (Of course, being a private detective is not quite the same as being a police detective. And also, Eddie is always quick to point out how much fictional TV shows get wrong.) But the case ends up becoming much bigger than either of them could have predicted, and when they solve it, the press makes a big deal out of Sam's involvement. This leads to many potential new clients wanting to hire Eddie and Sam as a team. Thus, the premise is established.

There's also a police detective named Christine Rollins, with whom Eddie has an occasional, casual hookup kind of relationship. And she often provides help for him on his cases. And in the second episode, we meet Sam's new assistant, Monica (who is also a psychology student), who will also end up providing some help with cases. I also need to mention that in the first episode, we learn of a mysterious mob boss called "Deacon," whose real identity no one knows. Sam and Eddie's case leads to their discovery that he is actually a judge named Noah Chambers, and because of them, he goes to jail. However, later in the season, he arranges to have a witness killed, so he is released. In the season finale, Deacon enacts a plan to frame Eddie for murder. The episode ends with Eddie being arrested by Christine, so that's quite a cliffhanger. I'd really like to see a second season to resolve this, but given the show's low ratings, that probably won't happen. It's a shame, not just because of the cliffhanger, but just in general because I found the show reasonably entertaining, and I liked the characters. I mean, it certainly wasn't as good as "Castle," but I do think it was fairly decent for a summer series of just 13 episodes. It really deserved a bigger audience.


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