Blood & Treasure Review: The Curse of Cleopatra: Parts I & II (Season 1 Episodes 1 and 2)
The latest in a line of world-hopping historical fiction properties, CBS’s Blood & Treasure Season 1 Episodes 1 & 2 “The Curse of Cleopatra,” is The Starter Kit of summer filler television, a globe-trotting parade of cliche stories and budget action scenes, with a few dashes of thin characters, sharp costuming and casual misogyny.
There are a few moments where Blood & Treasure‘s opening hours offer a window of potential for the series to follow — but it takes nearly all of the pilot’s interminable 84-minute running time to get there, which is mostly a barrage of nonsensical dialogue, interrupted occasionally by a loud action moment or a horribly-lit flashback sequence.
There is a lot of plot doled out over the course of the two-part pilot; and though the title suggests something else, it’s this that is the curse of Blood & Treasure‘s first episodes. The plot is relatively simple: art expert Danny McNamara (Matt Barr) employs con woman Lexi Vaziri (Sofia Pernas) to help track down the sarcophagi of Antony and Cleopatra, and get entangled in a vaguely mystical plan from a secret society.
But “The Curse of Cleopatra” really, really wants the audience to think it is a lot more complicated than that; instead of letting the globe-trotting speak for itself, writers Matthew Federman & Stephen Scaia turn every scene into a festival of exposition, throwing on layer after empty layer of suggested back story, potential motives, and nascent plot points.
It’s no wonder neither half of the pilot can ever capture the speed and urgency of its story — it spends so much time explaining every minute detail, any sense of momentum is lost whenever there aren’t explosions or gunfire.
It’s one thing to give context and build a world; it’s another, much less entertaining thing to make every scene feel like a checklist of plot points, and the scripting of both hours is full of characters talking out the story to each other, with little inflection of character to add flavor to the text.
Beyond the pale scripting and lack of real dramatic propulsion, Blood & Treasure‘s biggest issue is its main character, former FBI agent turned art hunter-for-hire Danny McNamara.
An absolute milquetoast main character, Danny is one of those protagonists who succeeds simply by projecting optimism; since he is a semi-intelligent white guy lacking in any distinct skill (beyond knowledge of art history), he is somehow oblivious to the criticisms and shortcomings presented to other characters in his atmosphere, giving him an aura of confident, aimless optimism that makes him eternally boring.
A better version of this show focuses more on Pernas’ Lexi, a con woman exuding the kind of morally compromised action star persona this show so desperately wants to capture.
As the gateway to the underground art world (and a woman with an eye for fancy Nonsense TV Tech), Lexi is an inherently more interesting presence in “The Curse of Cleopatra” — especially in the pilot’s second half, when her dialogue finally gets room outside the plot to breathe, and she can show off Lexi’s slightly cynical, witty personality (in the few moments when she’s not reacting to being fondled, that is).
There’s a strong secondary cast to lean on, that might give Blood & Treasure a bit of life as it builds through its first season. Michael James Shaw (Limitless) and Katia Winter (Legends of Tomorrow) don’t feature prominently in their roles as international arms dealer and Interpol agent (respectively) in these opening hours, but their few scenes offer a bit of spark to breathe some color into the larger world of the show.
Blood & Treasure‘s pilot is not an utter failure of television production — but it is thoroughly uninspired, from a lifeless, lazy portrayal of a ‘terrorist’ antagonist, to a chemistry-free ‘will they, won’t they’ the show wants so direly to push on the audience.
There is a good version of this show buried somewhere in the heart of Blood & Treasure, but it will take more than Nazi cults, well-tailored formal wear, and overt homages to older, better versions of this story, if it wants to take the mantle of Network Summer Blockbuster.
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Blood & Treasure airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on CBS.
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Randy Dankievitch
Randy Dankievitch is a TV critic living in Portland, Maine, whose obsession with pop culture began as a child, watching reruns of The Muensters while listening to Paul's Boutique on repeat. A writer since 2011, Randy is currently the writer of TV Never Sleeps, TV Editor at Goomba Stomp, and a columnist for Up Portland, with previous bylines at Sound on Sight, Processed Media, TV Overmind, and many others.