I’ll just come right out and say it: NBC’s summer mystery series Persons Unknown was quite possibly the worst television show I have ever watched. Considering I grew up watching TV in the 70s and 80s, that saying a lot. I mean, I have been known to watch a SyFy Original Movie for Chrissake.
The acting – with one or two exceptions, like Kandyse McClure and Tina Holmes – was consistently poor. I tried to write it off to the big “mystery”, that perhaps it just seemed like poor acting when in fact they were purposely acting weird to throw the viewer off track or something like that; but then it became all too evident that these people just sucked.
I’m not going to describe the story because there was no story, save for the premise – which I admit is what drew me to PU (HA! how apropos!) in the first place – of 7 strangers waking up in a fake, uninhabited town. Absolutely NOTHING happened in 13 episodes and in fact, I think I could have watched the final two episodes right after the first and not noticed that I missed anything. In the end, not only were there no answers provided, not only were the characters right back in the same situation, literally, but what they did show us made no sense at all.
And then there was the Robert Picardo cameo, with him wearing a long white wig and looking like Lucius Malfoy on a really bad day. Completely arbitrary, weird and worse, just plain BAD.
Don’t bother.