"Life" Review

Life focuses on Charlie Crews, a policeman who recently spent 12 years in prison. New evidence showed that he was wrongly imprisoned and thanks to his rather sexy lawyer, Constance Griffiths (Brooke Langton), he is released with a rather large sum of money. Even though he is rich beyond his dreams, he chooses to rejoin the police department as a homicide detective.

Charlie Crews is played by Damian Lewis who most notably played as Richard Winters of the WWII drama, Band of Brothers.

Crews is partnered up with Dani Reese (Sarah Shahi) and each episode is focused around them solving murders. At the same time, Crews is secretly trying to find out who framed him.

Having spent many years in prison, Crews discovers how the world has changed and finds out about the internet, mobile phones etc, which adds some humour to the show. He also has some strange habits which are undoubtedly a result of his time in prison. Overall, I find that Charlie Crews is an interesting character who is well played by Damian Lewis.

11 episodes have been aired in America but I found that the main plot (Crews finding out who framed him) develops too slowly for my liking. And what's worse is that all the beans are spilt on the eleventh episode for the mid-season cliffhanger* when they could have revealed some of the information in earlier episodes. I suppose each episode's homicide case is interesting enough to cure this problem but sooner or later the writers will need to develop the main more in each episode to retain its viewers.

Finally, as much as I like Damien Lewis's character, I feel that more time needs to be spent on developing other characters especially Dani Reese.

Overall, it's a pretty good first season show. It has me hooked for now and I will be continuing to watch as long as they speed the plot development up a little.

UK viewers can catch Life on ITV early next year.

*Could be the season finale cliffhanger the way the writers strikes are going.