Welcome to The TV MegaSite's Primetime TV Site!

(Best viewed in the most recent browser versions--update now!)

Please click on the menus above to browse through our site...

Primetime Show Reviews

"New Amsterdam" Review by Suzanne 3/6/08

Normally, I am not too fond of TV shows or movies that try to be more than one thing at a time.  Fortunately, New Amsterdam is one of those exceptions. It is both an excellent police show and a fabulous scifi/fantasy show as well.

The show is about John, a New York City police detective who can't die. When he was young and visiting the New World, he was stabbed trying to defend an Indian woman. The indian women, including a shaman, did something to him with smoke and herbs that would prevent him from ever dying or growing old.

Now, of course this story has been done before in shows like "Highlander", "Angel" and the more recent "Moonlight". Like the heroes of those shows, John bemoans the fact that the is not mortal or human any more, and he would like to grow old and die. I have to confess that's one aspect of these shows I never could understand. How many of us would love to never grow old or never die?

But anyway, this show has one "catch" that the others don't.  He has to find his one true love (which they call "The One") and mate with her, then he will finally become mortal again.  In the first episode, he has a heart attack just because she is nearby. So now he knows, after living for 400 years, that he can finally find her.  Trouble is, she's the doctor who pronounced him dead after the heart attack.

Assisting John are his son, Omar, who is in his 60's; and his new cop partner, Eva Marquez.  All of the acting is great. The actor who plays John, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, is Danish, but he manages to hide his accent for the most part. You might expect that someone who has lived so long and moved around might have a strange accent.  Then again, it appears that he's lived in New York for the last 200 years, so it is a little weird that he doesn't have a really strong New York accent!

Despite the few flaws, such as the fact that it moves a little slow, like an old film noir, it is a really good show and worth checking out. I plan to keep watching!

Back to the Main Primetime TV Page