“Wisdom of the Crowd” and “The Gifted.”
Here are two shows no one needed to make and no one needs to see: “Wisdom of the Crowd,” a CBS show with a terrible title and Jeremy Piven, and Fox’s “The Gifted,” useful in the mounting evidence attesting to the fact that there are too many Marvel shows on TV. They aren’t so much bad as unnecesssary.
“Wisdom,” based on a South Korean show of the same name and premiering Sunday, Oct. 1, stars Piven as a Silicon Valley tech giant named Jeffrey Tanner who, on the one-year anniversary of his daughter’s murder, announces he’s quitting the company he founded in order to devote full time to using crowdsourcing to find his daughter’s killer.
Tanner has invented a device to aggregate crowdsourced data to solve crimes. He calls the gizmo Sophie and has a staff of valley nerds working with a real cop, Detective Cavanaugh (Richard T. Jones) to help him prove the man jailed for the murder, Carl Ochoa (Ramses Jimenez), didn’t do it. Cavanaugh’s role is not just to provide crime-solving expertise, but also to represent the skepticism the audience will likely feel about the concept of solving crimes through crowdsourcing.
Piven and Jones are wasted in formulaic predictability. By the end of the first episode, you’ll realize that the show will focus on a crime of the week, essentially doing a bargain basement take on “Person of Interest.” We should know by now that the growing and insatiable need for content on every platform of television is resulting in some great shows and a lot of meh shows. What’s also true is that the apparently growing and insatiable need for Marvel shows is really getting out of hand. Yes, some of them are very good and we all get that the shows are part of the socalled Marvel Universe. But there are some dead asteroids in that universe as well as bright stars.
“The Gifted” is a semi-dead asteroid, premiering on Monday, Oct. 2. The series is about a normal married couple named Reed (Stephen Moyer) and Caitlin (Amy Acker) Strucker who discover that their kids have mutant powers. All of a sudden, Reed, whose job has been to prosecute mutants, has to shift gears and save his kids from being rounded up.
He finds himself relying on the underground mutant community for help and support. The kids and other mutants use their powers to help the family escape.
The show, created by Matt Nix, is hampered by a sometimes laughably bad script and second-rate special effects, not to mention the predictability of the story line.
The actors playing the Strucker kids, played by Natalie Alyn Lind and Percy Hynes White, deliver decent performances, as do Acker and Moyer, but it all feels underwhelming.
Maybe it’s about time for TV to be a little less Marvelous. David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Follow him on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV