Viewers are Winners, Too, with the New Windfall
Viewers are Winners, Too, with the New Windfall by Roxanne McDonald
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When a new TV show airs with a cliché premise and a lot of loud hype weeks before it airs, hype that includes “The show that ALL America is talking about” [NO, not everyone…ahem], we might balk and opt to avoid such a re-make, repeat, or reductive, derivative effort. |
However, when the same kind of show pulls it off, makes a tired theme fresh, adds shock and sexuality and intrigue (if you will allow me such an antiquated term reserved for James Bond movies and Batman series announcers) in a an unexpected way, and/or brings back favorite Hollywood icons who are once again believable in the roles they play, we need to give the show another look. Such a show is Windfall, on NBC on Thursday nights.
Windfall features a number of competent, attractive, and uniquely engaging characters/actors. But Windfall also co-stars Luke Perry, the undeniably delicious bad boy of the long-lived and long since retired Beverly Hills, 90210—rest in peace Aaron Spelling). Luke as Peter is older, of course, has a couple of frown or brow wrinkles that thankfully he never had BoToxed out, and is as ever the fence-riding renegade of the bunch…
though 1) he is married and has married, mature responsibilities and concerns; and 2) he is not the baddest boy renegade as much as is one of the other characters, Sean (played by the suave yet sulky D.J. Cotrona).
Other characters are ordinary, beneficent, greedy, adulterous, while still others play the victim, play the villain, or play the arm chair detective, seeking information on the one who disappeared with millions of dollars or the one who is too young, too spendthrifty, or too much an outsider.
Now after all this vague teasing about who is who and who Luke Perry brings back to us who had his posters plastered over bedroom walls a decade ago, do you want to know about the main premise of the show Windfall?
It is as its name suggests about a group of suburbanite friends and acquaintances who at a party at the moderately done up home of Peter and his wife Nina (played by Lana Parrilla) all chip in for a ticket and jot down their names on a lottery list.
One night,
having had (or about to have) a heavy make-out scene with high school heartthrob Cameron (played by the popular Jason Gedrick), with whom she is having an affair, or wants to, or is about to…Nina gets out of Cameron’s car at the seven-eleven (or quick stop, played by your standard all-night convenience store), goes in, buys the groups weekly ticket, and then, upon looking longingly, wistfully, seductively, etc. out the window at her clandestine paramour, decides to add one more number—one which uses her affair man’s birthdate.
And yes, you got it, the adulterous number is the inning number, yielding for this casual group of lottery players hundreds of millions of dollars.
So, yes, Windfall has the “what would you do?” implications; it carries out the dramas of people coming from underneath rocks, out of caves, and out of the woodwork to claim relationships or old debts (or even forced fake debts).
But, too, Windfall keeps one’s attention on the interesting twists of the boy in the winner’s group who is too young to collect so he marries a Russian immigrant who turns out to be draining his checking account behind his back, of the exploitation, of the extortion, and of the occasional deadly threat…all of which somehow stay relevant and realistic to an audience who for the most part would not turn away millions if the lottery happened to them, despite the implied connotations of wind and falling in the title, Windfall.
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