Gone Too Soon: Limitless sadly failed to live up to its name.
How a mediocre film about mind-altering drugs became a small-screen cult classic
WHAT WOULD YOU do if there was a drug that allowed you to access the full potential of your brain, instantly turning you into one of the smartest people on the planet? It’s a wish-fulfilment premise laden with so much potential that 2011 movie Limitless
— which first introduced us to the smart pill known as NZT-48 — only skimmed the surface. It would take four more years for viewers to delve deeper into this world of nootropic drugs, switching from the silver screen to the small in a move that proved inspired. With room to breathe and a more playful tone, the spin-off took the concept and ran with it, becoming a rare show that is better than the movie it’s based on.
Much of why Limitless 2.0 works so well is down to Jake Mcdorman’s Brian Finch. Like Bradley Cooper’s Edward Morra in the movie, he starts out as a perennial underachiever and a disappointment to family and friends alike. But there’s a difference in what each protagonist chooses to do with their newfound mental agility: for Morra, it’s to make as much money as possible, cover up murder cases he’s involved in, and ultimately acquire power. For Finch, it’s all about helping people — whether in his role as an FBI consultant, assisting his dad (Ron Rifkin) or lending a hand to random strangers on the street during his day off. As fun as it was to watch Cooper outmanoeuvre everyone he went up against, the more NZT he took, the more sketchy he became. Finch, by contrast, was someone we could root for, and while he’s tested time and time again, his Captain America-esque selflessness — combined with Mcdorman’s charismatic and funny performance — kept each episode entertaining, even when the case-of-the-week wasn’t especially clever.
Limitless was a show that managed to be fun because of its procedural elements, rather than in spite of them. Showrunner Craig Sweeny rarely passed up an opportunity to experiment with different aspects of the show’s format and lean into its goofy premise: the fourth wall was consistently broken,
many exposition dumps were rendered as weird skits taking place only in Brian’s drug-fuelled mind, and gags would occasionally last the entirety of an episode. ‘Stop Me Before I Hug Again’, for instance, saw Brian replace all the awful words he’s subjected to while working a particularly grisly serial killer case with more agreeable diction (think “rainbows” instead of “corpse”). Then there was ‘Headquarters!’ ending with a 22 Jump Street-esque tag titled ‘The Bruntouchables’, and ‘Brian Finch’s Black Op’ was an unapologetic homage to Finch’s favourite movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
The show was graced with an assortment of interesting characters, who were each given their moments to shine, chief among them Special Agent Rebecca Harris (Dexter’s
Jennifer Carpenter), Brian’s FBI handler.
That relationship — which smartly remained platonic throughout — became the series’ biggest emotional anchor, the backstory with her father tying into the history of NZT for added punch. Agent Spelman Boyle (Hill Harper), meanwhile, is initially reluctant to trust in Brian and NZT, later becoming tempted to give the pill to the sick mother he cares for. Even typically stock characters like Brian’s bodyguards ‘Mike’ (Michael James Shaw) and ‘Ike’ (Tom Degnan) — whose real names Finch refused to learn — made their presence felt as the series progressed.
Of course, the other significant star in this equation was Cooper. His inclusion in the series, this time as a pseudo-antagonist, was one of the buzzier elements before the show aired. Although he only ended up appearing in a handful of episodes, Morra loomed large over the entire run, and one of the season’s major threads was unravelling the NZT conspiracy he was at the head of. It was a mystery set to become more intriguing too: while he ended the 2011 movie as a shoo-in for the United States Senate, the series saw Morra announce his candidacy for President. And, after being in the dark for so long, the FBI were finally in the know about his ties to NZT once the season drew to a close, setting the stage for a major showdown that would have dramatically altered the dynamic of the show.
But it wasn’t to be. While Limitless’ ratings peaked at a healthy ten million viewers, that number gradually dipped, falling to just under six million by the end of the show’s run. It was cancelled shortly after the season finale in 2016, leaving plenty of untapped potential in its wake. THEN-CBS President Glenn Geller said that, despite its quality, he didn’t think it “connected with the viewers as well as other shows” on the network had. It was duly shopped around streaming giants Netflix and Amazon, but they ultimately deemed the series too complex to pick up.
Although CBS had been supportive of the show’s experimental bent from the get-go, Limitless’ boundary-pushing ethos ultimately contributed to its demise. Yet this very quality was also the secret to its appeal. Pushing past its source material’s stylistic and narrative limitations and striving to be the best version of itself — much like someone on NZT — Limitless showed what an investigative procedural was capable of. The effects might have been fleeting, but the show’s high was one to remember.