The Finder: Is the New FOX Series Worth Watching?

This evening FOX unveils their Bones spin-off, The Finder. Bones has been a quiet success for the network and, considering the positive ratings that CBS has found spinning off their crime dramas (not counting Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior of course), it makes sense that FOX would want to try their own.

On The Finder, Geoff Stults plays Walter Sherman, an Iraq war veteran who, during the war, had a reputation as being a go-to guy for tracking down insurgents and finding improvised explosive devices (IEDs). He suffers severe brain damage while overseas and miraculously becomes even more skilled than before. Other stars of the series include Maddie Hasson, Mercedes Masohn, and Michael Clarke Duncan.

Thursday night presents some tough choices for TV viewers so is this new show worth your time? Here’s what the critics are saying:

NY Daily News: “Behind some fancy footwork and quirky sidelights, The Finder is your basic procedural — a drama set up and resolved each week by characters the show hopes we will root for… There’s potential here. If the characters can bond into an interesting dysfunctional family, The Finder could be worth finding.”

Chicago Tribune: “When the narrative and plot start to unravel, the writers pull things back together using Sherman’s special abilities to explain things away — common sense be damned. Stults and the rest of the cast are charming and likeable, so hopefully The Finder will find its footing. Maybe Hanson should hire Sherman to search for a little bit of logic.”

USA Today: “Put that all together, and you have one incredibly busy hour. Unfortunately, busy is not the same as complex — and neither is necessarily the same as interesting. If you want the bright-side view, here it is: Stults has the makings of an appealing procedural hero (even if his powers remain largely unexplained and seem to make no sense), and he already has amusing screen chemistry with Duncan. In future episodes, when it’s no longer necessary to spell out his problems and motivations, the show may be able to relax into the kind of easy weekly entertainment you can find an hour earlier on Bones.”

LA Times: “What Sherman, and the series, have going for them is a tendency toward truth-telling that is neither bitter nor wounded, which offers some hope. Sherman’s relationships are refreshingly adult for the genre as is his life view, which isn’t so much that everybody lies but that everybody lies sometimes. It took Bones, which remains one of my favorite shows, some time to find its feet, so maybe we should just keep watching.”

NY Times: “But if the various kinks work themselves out, The Finder will at the least be a medium-strength entry in the increasingly crowded field of comedy-dramas featuring eccentric characters.”

What do you think? Is The Finder worth watching? Will you tune in again or do you think it should be cancelled to make way for something better?

Image courtesy FOX.

More about: Bones, The Finder, The Finder: canceled or renewed?

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