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Not much to recommend

‘New Amsterdam’

Meet John Amsterdam. He was a pilgrim of some sort in the 1600s, until he got shot in the chest saving the life of a young American Indian shaman. So she brought John back to life with some sort of ritual that clearly isn’t used too often – that he’ll remain young and strong and alive until he finds his true love.

Viewers are asked to weave this fairytale understanding into a modern cop drama set in New York called “New Amsterdam,” the old name of New York City.

John, played by Nicolaj Coster-Waldau, makes connections with people over the years. They age and die while he stays youthful and outlives everyone. Currently he’s maintaining a work space in the back of some old musician friend’s bar where he creates and restores furniture and sells it for outrageous prices to collectors.

As investment strategies go, it beats the pension he’ll never draw from his service in the NYPD as a homicide detective. In the pilot episode he meets his new partner, Eva Marquez, played by Zuleikha Robinson. He tells her she’s going to not want to work with him, although it never becomes clear why that is. After all, he’s got several lifetimes of experience to draw on in tracking down forensic evidence and he’s cute as a button. What’s not to love?

Add to that that he’s apparently worked something out with someone that he gets to swim around naked in a Y – Marquez encountered him swimming laps after hours – and that he has a near photographic memory for artwork and artists and speakeasies and ... apparently he has a dog. In the final scenes as the camera is pulling away, he’s walking a dog that was never otherwise mentioned in the course of the episode.

A little tame

For an immortal, I didn’t notice him doing anything especially reckless. When he was chasing down a suspect, he got hung up by dithering about on a fire escape while his quarry sprinted off gleefully, escaping on a stolen bike down a subway entrance. Heck, the kid was behaving much more indestructible than Amsterdam.

I noticed him just being really casual about how old he is, referencing historical events flippantly and daring a reaction. If this weirds his colleagues out at all they don’t show it. His friend at the bar knows his story and one wonders how many others do. Generally he’s pretty coy, but he hasn’t been especially secretive about his longevity.

As for the fairy tale, it looks like he’s ready for his mortality. While chasing down a suspect, he has a heart attack and dies momentarily. The shaman had told him this would be a signal that he’d encountered his true love, and he apparently did so in the pilot episode. The object of his affection seems to be the coroner, who is rightly confused about his getting up from her lab table and walking away.

Well, he did say he likes puzzles.

Between the terrible makeup effects used to simulate colonial times and the goofy storyline and the “acting,” I got disengaged as a viewer and thrown out of the narrative several times in the course of the premiere. Amsterdam’s reunion with his Jazz Age lady love who was now suffering from Alzheimer’s was sweetly sentimental. His ungloved investigation of a bloodstain at a crime scene was not.

The story itself seemed pretty weak overall. It might work as a romance-driven character piece if they start creating any romance – or characters, for that matter. Otherwise, there’s not much to recommend it.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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