Prime Video’s latest addition to its dadcore line-up—which also includes Reacher, Jack Ryan, Bosch, and The Terminal List—is Cross, a new series starring Aldis Hodge as Alex Cross, author James Patterson’s famous detective, who’s previously been played on the big screen by Morgan Freeman (Kiss the Girls, Along Came a Spider) and Tyler Perry (Alex Cross).
Like its streaming service brethren, showrunner Ben Watkins’ eight-part thriller, premiering Nov. 14, is buoyed by a charismatic leading man and a heavy dose of manliness. Ultimately, however, it’s undone by the same sort of distension that plagues so many modern television offerings, not to mention a contrived plot that’s as ridiculous as its attempts to straddle the line between celebrating and critiquing cops. Only thriving when its ludicrousness overwhelms its other concerns, it’s a rickety start to what’s obviously intended as a franchise.
In Washington, D.C., Cross (Hodge) is a celebrity for his prior crime-fighting exploits alongside his childhood friend and partner John Sampson (Isaiah Mustafa). Still, a year after the murder of his wife Maria (Chaunteé Schuler Irving), who died in his arms, Cross remains an emotional and psychological wreck, whose closed-off attitude worries his grandmother Regina (Juanita Jennings), aka “Nana Mama,” as well as his young son Damon (Caleb Elijah) and daughter Janelle (Melody Hurd).
No matter his grieving, Cross (who has a PhD in psychology) hasn’t lost a step when it comes to analyzing and outsmarting bad guys. When a former drug-dealer named Emir Goodspeed (Donovan Brown) turns up dead and everyone—including Chief Anderson (Jennifer Wigmore) and Lieutenant Massey (Sharon Taylor)—determine that he perished due to an overdose, Cross is the sole one who sees that there’s more to this case than meets the eye.
Emir’s demise and law enforcement’s eagerness to dismiss it as an accident sparks police protests that soon embroil the department, and Cross spends a good bit of its early going having Cross and Sampson suffer slings and arrows from the likes of Emir’s sister Malika (Ashley Rios), who derisively calls them “The Tom Squad.”
Though meant to be timely, such tensions are straight out of 2020, as is the preposterous fact that Cross is dating a woman, Elle Monteiro (Samantha Walkes), who’s actively in favor of defunding the police. Watkins diligently refuses to pick a side in this debate, giving voice to activists’ complaints and saddling Cross with his very own police-brutality scandal—and having him take anguished responsibility for his Black community-betraying actions—while simultaneously making clear that he and his colleagues aren’t prejudiced and, generally, are noble crusaders trying to do good in a compromised system.
Cross’ wishy-washy racial politics are a drag, whereas its primary narrative is mostly a laugh. Looking into Emir’s passing, Cross becomes convinced that the man was the victim of a mysterious fiend, and the show quickly reveals this individual to be Ed Ramsey (New Amsterdam’s Ryan Eggold), a wealthy D.C. wheeler-dealer with bleach blonde hair, a charming smile, and a demented m.o.
Desperate to pay tribute to his serial killer forebears, whom he wants to stand beside in history, Ramsey is engaged in a project in which he kidnaps strangers and remakes them into famous homicidal fiends (Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, etc.), all so he can take their photograph and place their pictures in his scrapbook, side-by-side with portraits of their inspirations. To complete this endeavor, Ramsey snatches Shannon Witmer (Eloise Mumford) with the intention of transforming her into Aileen Wuornos—a makeover he carries out in the soundproofed basement of his mansion.
Ramsey views himself as an artist whose scheme will show the world some deep truth about death, but it’s elaborate and flamboyant to the point of absurdity, and it undercuts the series’ feigned realism. Like Cross’ hokey credit sequence, Ramsey’s undertaking resembles something that might have been seen in an early-2000s CBS procedural.
Worse, it’s drawn out to interminable lengths, so that whole episodes could have been easily excised without appreciable loss. At the same time, Watkins pads his material with a handful of less interesting subplots, the most grating of which is a stalker who begins by sending Cross flowers and then graduates to breaking into his house (where they leave the Redskins scarf that Maria was wearing when she died) and menacing Janelle via Cross’s newly installed home security system.
Hodge is such a commanding presence that Cross is rarely forgettable, and in a lighter and fleeter story, his mixture of badass toughness, passion and sensitivity, and intellectual acumen (his powers of deduction make him akin to a 21st-century Sherlock Holmes) would be even more engaging. Alas, Watkins’ tale mires him in crises that are either uninteresting or implausible, undercutting his magnetic turn. To a lesser extent, the same holds true for Cross’s partner Sampson; Hodge and Mustafa have a winning brotherly rapport, and yet their eventual (temporary) falling out is another in a long line of clichéd twists.
Cross mixes sleuthing, fighting and romance to relatively unadventurous ends, and its desire to position its protagonist as a hero of deep regret, sorrow, and conscience—and to habitually remind viewers about it—grows tiresome. Better is the saga’s latter half, once Cross and Ramsey engage in an overt cat-and-mouse game and everything turns amusingly over-the-top. Given Ramsey’s cosplaying copycat plan, which he executes with multiple accomplices who are totally down with his highly particular serial-killer preoccupation, goofiness is inevitable, and there’s something refreshing about the series’ decision to embrace its silliness.
That’s truest when it comes to the finale, during which Cross deals with a second conspiracy that has absolutely nothing to do with Ramsey’s reign of terror and thus comes across as a tacked-on addendum. There’s no reason for this bonkers thread except to fill out Prime Video’s eight-episode order, and yet the loopier Cross becomes, the more it entertains.
Consequently, one hopes that, for its second season, it takes a page out of Reacher’s book and emphasizes its strengths (excessive pulpiness, Hodges and Mustafa, intricate detective work, rough-and-tumble action), discards its weaknesses (everything else), and finds a better tale to tell—the last of which shouldn’t be too difficult, considering that Patterson wrote 32 novels featuring the character.
