Whiskey Something: Spy vs. Spy, with Gender Stereotypes

While researching Miracle Workers, I saw an article entitled "Miracle Workers, Whiskey...." and subtitled "Two shows to keep your eye on."

Whiskey what?  That's as far as the title went, and I didn't want to go to the article site, for fear of endless pop up ads: "Subscribe to our newsletter!  Don't miss a single article!  Buy!  Buy!  Buy!"

So I searched for tv series and movies with "Whiskey" in their titles.

Whiskey Foxtrot Tango, Whiskey River, Whiskey Bay, The Whiskey Bandit, Whiskey Fist, Whiskey Blue.  Whiskey Business, Whiskey Wars...

 Well, which one was it?  It was impossible to tell without knowing the precise name.  So I had to click on the original article after all.

Whiskey Cavalier.  It's a new series, with only two episodes aired to date, so no wonder it's a bit obscure.

The less-than-informative title is the code name of FBI agent Will Chase (Scott Foley, top photo, who's been on every romantic drama since Sweet Valley High).  He teams up with Agent Scully....um, I mean Maddie....or is it Diane? Mrs. King?  Mrs. Peel?   Well, one of the hundreds of women on tv and in movies who are partnered with a man they think is "arrogant" (a word which here means "sexy").  Bickering and hetero-romance follow.

So far, so cliched.

Action adventure series usually begin with the main character mourning a dead husband or wife, to give them a "sympathetic" back story yet leave them open to romance with their new partner. Here the cliche is tweaked a bit:  we open on Will crying and listening to sad songs after being dumped by his fiancee.   Somehow his crying video goes viral, making his colleagues worry about his masculinity.  (A man who cries? He must really be a woman.)

Will and his partner Ray (Josh Hopkins, left), whose affair with the fiancee led to the breakup  (the soap opera thickens) get an assigment to track down hacker Edgar Standish (Tyler James Williams, best known from Everybody Hates Chris), who has apparently grabbed some state secrets and absconded to Moscow.

Standish turns out to be innocent, a kidnapping victim. The bad guys, Russians or Chechens or Bulgarians or something, want to kill him.

CIA agent Frankie Trowbridge (Lauren Cohan, Maggie from The Walking Dead) also wants Edgar, so she, Will, and the bad guys play a ludicrous "Spy vs. Spy" game across Europe, all but hitting each other on the head and dragging Edgar away like in a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Wait -- Frankie does hit Will on the head and drag Edgar away.

Boris and Natasha were more competent.

This is far beyond the authority of either the FBI or the CIA.  Does anyone associatd with this show know what these agencies actually do, or are they just magic acronyms?

Will and Frankie argue incessantly, of course.  Will thinks Frankie is too butch, and Frankie, who has seen the damning video, thinks Will is too girly.

But, after the crisis is resolved, the bickering soon-to-be-lovers are forced to become the heads of a super-secret spy outfit, promising chases and fisticuffs in a different European capital every week (Prague first, then Rome).

Is this 1968? When you can see all the European capitals you want on Google Maps, why is that an audience draw?

By the way, their team consists of:

1. Sam and Diane...um, I mean Mulder and Scully...um...well, one of those

2. Ray, the muscle.

3. Edgar, the computer whiz.

4. Susan (Ana Ortiz, best known from Ugly Betty), the profiler.

5. Jai (Indian comedian Vir Das), the weapons specialist who builds exploding tampons and cosmetic kits.  One review states that he is probably gay.  He wears lavender, and he isn't grossed out by tampons.

I won't be sticking around to find out.