Doug Hansen

Life comes at you fast when you're an old man (IOK) and this series took only five episodes to "jump the shark". Ron Howard would be beaming with pride had he been involved. All the action and suspense of the first four episodes which culminated in a somewhat incredulous threat by a suddenly emboldened mousy kidnap "victim", has, by episode five, devolved into inscrutable psycho-babble by protagonists that are now quite unsympathetic. Particularly sharkified and fish-smelly is the stultifying dialog between "the daughter" and John Lithgow. Her face acting is way over-done, laughably so in XCU and Lithgow seems aghast to even be playing the scene. He should be. In his scenes, true to type, Bridges appears to have lapsed into a kind of a darkly oblivious euphoria, as he drops his poor dogs off at the toniest downtown "dog hotel" imaginable and leaves his new ladyfriend/"victim" holding the trick bag in apparent retaliation for her credulity-stretching manoeveur of taking half his wealth, making Bridges a surrogate for her deadbeat ex-husband.