For the first three minutes of Fox‘s Memory of a Killer, Patrick Dempsey‘s Angelo projects suburban normalcy. He visits his pregnant daughter (Odeya Rush’s Maria) and son-in-law (Daniel David Stewart’s Jeff), makes small talk about his dead wife and his job selling office supplies. He drives Maria to her job teaching school.
At this point, Suburban Normcore Dad Angelo drives off in an SUV so boring it’s practically a station wagon and arrives at a lair in the wilderness, his very own bat cave where he changes out of his bland khakis and puffy vest into a sleek, perfectly tailored black suit. The boring car is left behind and replaced by a snazzy black Porsche EV.
Memory of a Killer
The Bottom Line
Too risible to be believable, not risible enough to be enjoyable.
Special premiere: Sunday, January 25, after the NFL playoffs (Fox)
Time period premiere: 9 p.m. Monday, January 26 (Fox)
Cast: Patrick Dempsey, Michael Imperioli, Richard Harmon, Odeya Rush, Daniel David Stewart, Peter Gadiot
Creators: Ed Whitmore and Tracey Malone
Because Angelo isn’t a boring suburban office supply salesman.
He’s a hitman, and if you can’t look and drive like a FREAKING HITMAN, what’s even the point of killing people for money?
It’s a ridiculous moment, one that instantly torpedoes any desire the show might have to be taken seriously as a semi-dramatically semi-grounded story about a hitman with Alzheimer’s, because it’s really a show about a dad who treats killing people as cosplay. He’s basically Batman. Alzheimer’s is basically the Joker (and not a very real neurodegenerative disease).
And the whole thing is just plain silly, which I take as the series’ blessing to say that, while Angelo represents a juicy part for Dempsey, one that he plays serviceably, the best part of Memory of a Killer is how perfect Dempsey’s “I’m a Hitman!” swept-back silver hair looks in every frame. I’m talking “better than a werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s” level of tonsorial perfection. The second best part of Memory of a Killer is Angelo’s “I’m a Hitman!” Porsche EV, which is lit and framed so flawlessly every time it appears onscreen that I assume Porsche has covered a goodly portion of the series’ budget. The third best part of Memory of a Killer is Angelo’s “I’m a Hitman!” wardrobe, which should come with ordering instructions.
Nothing else really comes close to the hair, the Porsche and the suits.
The show is based on the Belgian film De Zaak Alzheimer — “Zaak” means “case” in Dutch, if you’re hoping to learn Dutch from reading TV reviews — which was itself based on a Belgian novel of the same name and was previously adapted in English as the 2022 Liam Neeson film Memory, which you probably don’t remember, which isn’t an Alzheimer’s joke, just a reflection on some percentage of Liam Neeson’s recent cinematic output. You may, incidentally, be confusing Memory with the Michael Keaton film Knox Goes Away, about a hitman with a different, non-Alzheimer’s neurodegenerative disease — Creutzfeldt–Jakob, if you’re hoping to acquire medical knowledge from reading TV reviews — but they’re different movies.
Anyway, Memory of a Killer was adapted for Fox by Ed Whitmore and Tracey Malone, with a pilot directed by Daniel Minahan, who has directed enough prestige cable dramas that it’s disappointing how much Memory of a Killer looks like a broadcast show.
The basics, again: Angelo’s daughter and annoying son-in-law think that he sells copiers, requiring frequent trips out of town. Instead, he goes to his bat cave and dons his hitman garb and goes into the city, where he kills people at the behest of Dutch (Michael Imperioli), who runs an Italian restaurant. Clearly there’s a good deal more to Dutch’s operation than just pushing pasta, but critics have only been sent the first two episodes and the depths of his dealings haven’t been explained.
Dutch has a bumbling nephew (Richard Harmon’s Joe), who serves as Angelo’s spotter, which is a thing hitmen have. In the first half of the pilot, Angelo kills some triad boss, even though the boss is attending his daughter’s birthday party, which presumably is ruined. Angelo has a code. Angelo’s code is very dumb. At least in the second episode, another killer mocks him for it.
Joe and Dutch know nothing about Angelo’s life in the burbs. Maria and Jeff know nothing about Angelo’s bat cave or the fact that he has a pimped-out — decorated, clearly, by Design Within Reach of Hitmen — apartment in the city. Why does Angelo need such an expensive bat cave, Hitman Porsche and bespoke suits? Why can’t he stay at a Motel 6 instead of owning a pied-a-terrorist? Does he only kill in New York City or does he have pimped-out pads everywhere? Honestly, if I were Maria and I learned what Angelo did for a living — and Maria will surely eventually learn what Angelo does for a living — I would be concerned about the “hitman” thing, but freaking enraged about the profligacy of his hitman lifestyle.
Oh, and Angelo has a brother who lives in some sort of facility — a decent facility, but not a facility so nice that it couldn’t be upgraded if Angelo spent less on suits and new Porsches — because he is in the deep stages of Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t caught in time for early therapies and a nurse says it would have helped if they’d known when the brother started forgetting things like his bank code.
Five minutes later, Angelo forgets the code to his hitman apartment’s security system.
Ruh-roh.
Also, Angelo has killed a lot of bad men and he’s maybe being followed by a mysterious stranger, and soon other people may start suspecting things — which, combined with his forgetfulness, isn’t good.
It takes very little time to see why previous adaptations of De Zaak Alzheimer have been feature films; the combination of suspense caused by neurodegenerative disease — so far treated exclusively as a plot point in a way that is just a wee bit icky — and the suspense caused by a secret criminal double life is not endlessly sustainable. Two hours? Sure. An HBO or FX show with six to eight episodes per season? Possibly with very careful writing. An ongoing broadcast show in which the language, sex and violence all have to be sanitized to the point of nothingness? Nah.
Memory of a Killer is, in fact, the third Fox procedural to premiere in the past 13 months about middle-aged professionals struggling to do their jobs under cognitively-altered circumstances, rendering “killing people” and “Alzheimer’s” interchangeable with “doctoring” and “whatever’s off with the main characters on Doc and Best Medicine.”
This is a weird formula, Fox. Please go back to more civilian contractors helping professionals solve crime.
And the writing in Memory of a Killer is not, unfortunately, all that careful. It’s clumsy throughout. It’s big things like the leaden exposition of the dialogue filling us in on Angelo’s professional backstory. It’s medium-sized things like the volume of foreshadowing dialogue about not forgetting things long before we get a diagnosis for Angelo. And then it’s little dumb things like consecutive scenes in which we meet unrelated characters named Linda (Gina Torres) and Belinda — the sort of thing where a network note should have been, “Can the character we’ll never see again be named Barbara?”
Memory of a Killer is clunky and silly, and any rough edges that could exist on a cable show with different decency standards and 10 more minutes per episode have been sanded down.
Speaking of “sanding down,” Dempsey really is solid, but Angelo is so overly smooth and his hitman schtick is so overly slick and so much time is spent with Angelo being a loving father and grieving widower and caring brother, that I kept pondering how hard it is to craft a good antihero for broadcast TV. It isn’t impossible, but this isn’t it.
With simmering menace — “simmering,” because he spends a lot of time making pasta sauce — Imperioli comes closest to the sense of danger that’s absent in Dempsey’s performance. Rush makes Maria innocent and sweet, but not interesting. Stewart makes Jeff insecure and annoying, but since he’s the first one to think Angelo’s behavior is odd, he’s practically the show’s protagonist. There’s also a detective named Dave (Peter Gadiot), who is a detective named Dave and that’s about it.
I was — full credit — never bored watching Memory of a Killer. Lots of things happen in the two episodes I’ve seen. Too many of them, though, are risible. This is the sort of show that inevitably strains credulity as it goes along. If the suspension of disbelief becomes oppressive within three minutes, that’s not a story I want to invest in long-term.
