NBCUniversal’s Peacock debuts and gets reviewed
Service offerings range from the forgettable to the awful to bright light ‘Psych.’
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s ... yet another streaming service.
NBCUniversal’s Peacock launched this week, a new streamer competing for viewers’ eyeballs in the increasingly crowded market that also includes Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney+, Apple TV+, CBS All Access and HBO Max, plus smaller players like YouTube, Acorn TV, Crackle and Shudder.
The service, given its avian name from NBC’s longtime nickname, offers paid and free options. It is filled mostly with a library of titles (many available on other streamers) under the Comcast corporate umbrella, including NBC series and Universal movies such as “30 Rock,” “Battlestar Galactica” and “Reservoir Dogs.”
A handful of original series and films are available at launch, with more in the pipeline (some delayed due to the pandemic). Offerings include “Brave New World,” a liberal adaptation of the Aldous Huxley classic starring Demi Moore, Alden Ehrenreich (”Solo”) and Jessica Brown Findlay (”Downton Abbey”); “Intelligence,” a British sitcom starring David Schwimmer; “The Capture,” a British crime drama; “Lost Speedways,”: an unscripted car series helmed by Dale Earnhardt Jr.; a second “Psych” TV movie; a documentary about Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte; and new episodes of children’s shows.
Like its closest competitor, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, Peacock’s appeal is in its library of movies and shows we know and love. But its original program ranges from negligible to terrible.
“Intelligence,” about an NSA officer who joins a British cyber intelligence unit, is awful. The series, which has already aired in the U.K., is an attempt at a cringe comedy, but can’t find any humor in its awkward, tasteless jokes, and no amount of scenery chewing from Schwimmer can save it.
“Capture,” another series that already bowed across the pond, is dull and forgettable. The plot, about a soldier (Callum Turner) accused and then vindicated of a war crime who becomes a suspect in an assault the day of his liberation, feels more Mad Libs than original, a little “Bodyguard,” a little “Homeland,” a little “Broadchurch” mixed together.
Fans of “Top Gear” might enjoy “Lost Speedways,” but Earnhardt doesn’t offer much to the car-show genre we haven’t already seen. “In Deep with Ryan Lochte” is overwrought as a sports documentary (it’s no “The Last Dance”), painfully relitigating Lochte’s scandal at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Slick, expensive-looking and with the biggest name behind it, “Brave” should have been Peacock’s best offering, but instead is its biggest flop. Set in a futuristic world divided between a fascist society – no monogamy, no privacy, everyone belongs to a caste and everyone is drugged and happy all the time – and an anarchist one, the series takes three episodes to get to its main plot, which is what happens when a “savage” (Ehrenreich) joins the ranks of the “foreigners.”
However, the incredibly loose adaptation of the seminal novel is mostly an excuse for Peacock to offer some R-rated content, because it is free of broadcast standards. With more orgies than comprehensible plot points, the sex and nudity in “Brave” doesn’t just cross the line of good taste, it leaps over it with a smirk and a chortle. And despite the collective talent of its three main names, the acting falls spectacularly flat, as does the draggy plot.
“Psych 2: Lassie Come Home” is a bright light amid the original offerings, although it’s hard to call it a Peacock original when it’s the second TV movie based on a long-running USA Network show that easily could have aired there. Thankfully, the return of Shawn Spencer (James Roday) and Burton “Gus” Guster (Dulé Hill) doesn’t stretch the story too far (it feels like a typical midseries episode, just longer than usual). It also includes a wonderful return to the role of Lassiter for Timothy Omundson, after the actor had a stroke in 2017.
This isn’t all Peacock plans to offer. The streamer isn’t immune to the effects of the coronavirus-induced production shutdown that has affected all TV and film production. Remakes of “Galactica,” “Saved By the Bell” and “Punky Brewster,” along with the podcastbased “Dr. Death” with Jamie Dornan and Alec Baldwin, will come later, along with other shows.
Plus, new streamers usually need time to grow. Apple TV+ didn’t have much to offer until the debut of “Little America,” and we forget that Netflix’s first series wasn’t “House of Cards”; it was “Lilyhammer.”
But for now on Peacock, old episodes of “30 Rock” are your best bet.