“Love Hurts”

“Love Hurts” is an apt title for the season finale. Like the cheesy 70’s power ballad, this episode is chock full of cheese. Rumors are flying that this might be the series finale, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the last review SecondViews does on New Amsterdam…and honestly I couldn’t blame the network if it did cancel it. New Amsterdam as a whole has been an average show, with average to below average viewership.

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“Reclassified”

New Amsterdam took a nice step forward with this week’s episode, which was more of a filler episode than anything. Perhaps, that is why it worked so well. The episode was self-contained, so it allowed the creators to remain focused.

Amsterdam’s first partner comes to John asking him to solve a homicide…his.

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“Legacy”

New Amsterdam has struggled mightily to find it’s footing.

The 90210ish love angle between Amsterdam and Dr. Sarah is teetering on boredom. On again, off again doesn’t work too well in the long run and it works even less when the flip flops are so frequent.

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“Keep the Change”

It’s a tough enough to battle alcoholism. Now trying being an immortal alcoholic. It’s slightly tougher.

But it makes for good television drama.

“Keep the Change” is a definite step up from recent efforts and a great look at the human condition. It’s obvious that Sarah and John have done well together in between episodes, but it is also obvious that there is a lot going on in Sarah’s mind.

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“Honor”

Just when the last episode threw Amsterdam a curve regarding the love of his life, Sara, this episodes makes it clear that it wasn’t much of one. Sara being married was a surprising finale, due to the fact that it was never even hinted at throughout the time John and Sara were getting better acquainted.

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“Soldier’s Heart”

It was an episode that almost seemed as if it were getting ahead of itself. Here we are, only in episode 3 and he tracks down the girl he thinks is “the one”. When they meet, he doesn’t have another cardiac arrest, but is that a good thing or a bad thing? They spent most of their portion of the episode flirting and getting to know each other and all I kept thinking: Swerve coming soon. It had to, unless the show was already canceled and the producers decided to keep it a mini-series.

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“Golden Boy”

New Amsterdam is a very intelligent show when dealing with the immortal portion of it’s premise. I can’t decide whether the CSI portion is less intelligent or simply less exciting, but it does seem to take a back seat to the much more thrilling dealings with John’s quest for “The One” and revelations about his past. Perhaps it is simply that during CSI and it’s ilk, ALL they have is the crime. So the twists can be more twisty, more developed, and deeper. With the other half of New Amsterdam, the crime is much more surfacey and thus seems almost…cheapened because we’re used to thrilling crime stories.

It still is effective though once you accept that. The crime stories are not the focus, they are the means to the end, which is the development of John Amsterdam and his backstory.

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“Pilot”

When I first heard about New Amsterdam, I thought to myself OK, Highlander meets CSI. And basically…that’s what I got.

As a whole the show is pretty standard cop-investigation fare, but with the occasional reminder that John Amsterdam is indeed immortal. The pilot is hard to judge simply due to the fact that most of the episode spliced between a normal cop drama and the prologue portion of the series, catching you up through flash backs to show how John saved a Native American woman’s life and how she responding by saving his and making him immortal until he “finds the one” and their souls wed, yada yada yada - typical fare.

I certainly liked it enough to want to see it once it’s settled down, but this episode contained a ton of exposition and yet I don’t feel I got any of the characters yet.

John (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is pretty straightforward. It’s a hard role to play as how do you play someone with 400 years experience? He wasn’t someone I instantly liked, or disliked. So the verdict is still out on him.

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