Black Box

BLACK BOX:

Catherine Black (played by Kelly Reilly) is a well-known and one of the best neuroscientists in the medical field. She is passionate about her job as well as the people that she treats but she has a dark secret that could end her career and life. Catherine suffers from bipolar disorder and for the most part she can control it with the help of medicines and her psychiatrist Dr. Helen Hartamph (played by Vanessa Redgrave). For the most part though is not all the time and those times when she can't control herself, Catherine will do things that would shock her colleagues as well as get her into some serious trouble with her loved ones. But sometimes Catherine enjoys letting go and those are the times that she should worry about because they could expose her secret to the world. 

 

KISS THE SKY:

This show should be called chaos because there's just so much going on in this episode. We have the main character Catherine Black who is this great brain doctor that has bipolar disorder but the only ones that know about it are her brother and her psychiatrist. How it's possible that no one knows about her disorder considering that they show her going through episodes where she is out in the public and around people acting out. Plus being that she is such a well known doctor I would figure that at one point someone would have done a background check on her and they would have discovered the disorder. 
 

Anyways, let’s just go with the show saying that no one knows except for a few who wouldn't use it against her, but is that what the show is about? I don't know because there is just so much going on in the episode but it's never clear what the main point is. Is it about Catherine working with the disorder, maybe it's about her helping others when no one else can, maybe it's about her keeping her disorder a secret, or maybe it's about her getting her daughter back? Which all of these topics are touched on and all are good minor plot lines to keep the show going but what's the core reason for the show? This first episode felt more like I was watching the middle of one episode that was already in the fifth or sixth season instead of it being the pilot episode. As an episode that might be one for the 10th episode it would have been alright, but this pilot had too much going on in it while giving no clear cut direction for the show.
 

I wasn't too impressed with the acting either. I've seen Kelly Reilly in other things before and she is a decent actress but her performance was a split one. When she was normal and on the meds, yeah she was ok, she was believable as a doctor, but it was when she was going all crazy that I didn't like. It was like she was thinking too much about how to look like she has bipolar disorder but never ends up making her character have it. Most of the acting in this felt forced out by the actors. Maybe it's because they are worried about how to treat it with respect or they just can't figure out how to play these kind of characters but for whatever reason they are stiff in their performance. I think the show has some qualities that could make it a decent show but this was a not a good opener for Black Box. We get flash backs to different stories, characters that just pop in and out, and worst of all the show was just all over the place and it just wasn't that interesting.