Allegiance - Pilot

Take an American family with roots in Russia, whose odd son is way more intelligent than they’d ever imagined. And lots of secrets that will slowly be revealed and cause trouble all over the place. That’s a short description of the new NBC series ‘Allegiance’, which will form the new Thursday night of this station together with ‘the Blacklist’. The promo was quite exciting, and the first episode aired last week. Time to find out if this series will live up to my expectations.

Something I immediately noticed was the way they tried to keep the tension flowing during the pilot episode. The series starts with the termination of a Russian spy which will raise a lot of questions. As the episode progressed, these questions will be answered and you’ll slowly find out what’s been going on. Alex O’Connor (Gavin Stenhouse) has only been employed by the CIA for four months when he is asked to work as an analyst on one of their major new cases. An investigation into the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Services of Russia, who are planning something big in the United States. A great career booster, if his family would not have so much to do with it…

Even though I really liked the pilot episode, there were a few things that could’ve been done better. The background music for example was a bit too dramatic during some scenes. Music can really add a certain ambiance to a scene, but in this case it was more annoying than anything else. The soap opera looks at the end of some of the scenes, especially during the first half of the episode, were a bit too much as well. Not something I prefer, but then again also not that irritating that it ruins the whole show. The excitement and tension make up for a lot. Especially since that’s one of the most important aspects of these kinds of series.

Parents Mark (Scott Cohen, ‘Law & Order: Trial by Jury’) and Katya (Hope Davis, ‘Six Degrees’) also have two daughters, besides son Alex. Their youngest daughter is named Sarah (Alexandra Peters), she is still in school and too young to notice all the bad stuff that her family is involved in. Their eldest daughter Natalie (Margarita Levieva, ‘Revenge’) unfortunately wasn’t so lucky. She and her parents are part of a SVR spy group that is located in the USA. When Alex gets close to discovering the truth about his family, his parents are faced with an impossible task: recruit their son to spy for the SVR as well, or suffer the consequences. How will they manage to solve this problem and what has their old acquaintance Victor Dobrynin (Morgan Spector) got to do with all of this?

‘Allegiance’ is based on the Israeli series called ‘The Gordin Cell’. The American remake isn’t the only one, Russia and South Korea have also shown interest in the story and are producing their own version of it at the moment as well. The story comes across as quite complicated at first, but is explained well which makes it fairly easy to watch. There’s a lot going on during the first episode. And viewers are expected to watch closely as well. Hints and clues are giving throughout the episode, sometimes even before the characters themselves notice them. The acting is good, although I did notice it was a pilot episode sometimes, because of the lack of chemistry in some scenes.

My first impression of ‘Allegiance’ is definitely a positive one. I’m a big fan of the Thursday nights provided by TV station ABC, filled with series by Shonda Rimes. Even though the genres of the ABC and NBC Thursday nights are a bit different, I think there will be some competition between those two. ‘Allegiance’ could become quite big if they keep on improving this story. It isn’t where it should be, there is still some work to be done, but they started off pretty good with this pilot episode. I’m very curious to see what will happen to the O’Connor family this season. Although I do suspect it will involve a lot more secrets and deceiving others.