With Kate Beckinsale as a disgraced reporter. Who tries to regain her former glory to prove an imprisoned woman is innocent of the murder. The Guilty Party is the genuinely vexing mess of the mysterious series at its premiere. He never sticks to any tone of voice, refuses to give us characters to deal with. And is too poorly structured to engage us.
Guilty Party episodes last for about half an hour:
Which could be a blessing if the series keeps things tight, moving, and meaningful. But the Guilty Party pilot only delivers a third of the story you need in one introductory episode. And without the show is a product that can still overeat. It relies on and relies on it to keep us hooked. And that is a failure. Beckinsale’s Beth Baker isn’t pathetic enough to empathize with us, nor is she quirky or funny enough to captivate us.
Sometimes it seems that Beth is deprived of Legally Blond. Like a hidden brain that people despise. But then she gets distracted when she doesn’t show any insight, influence, or intuition in any area of her life. Furthermore, he’s even charismatically incompetent in any way that makes him relatable or exciting.
In this first episode, “The Last True Journalist Working in Denver”. We see Beth receiving a local award for “Excellence in Investigative Journalism”. Which is promptly revoked and her work in the Denver Chronicle removed for lying well, something. And that’s pretty much everything we learn about him in the pilot. That’s all we knew about Beth when we left the premiere. We never heard what the big lie was, why he did it, or any explanation from him. This was most likely to come later in the season, but it was too late. You can’t imagine a hero shell and expect viewers to take care of it.
Furthermore, nothing Beth does in this first chapter is brilliant.
He is foolish in many ways. Beth is crazy enough to work in pop culture reporting and crazy enough to believe that her new editor at Pop Bite wants stories about human trafficking or homelessness as if she goes to the work every day without knowing who she is.
And somehow, the show had the guts to commit a crime against Pop Bite for not reading the room he was in, not Beth. I had to buy it like a carcass, but there’s not a single situation in this first episode where he’s wrestling with the idea of an experienced person, someone else.
Guilty Party may improve as the season’s progress. As didn’t even touch on the actual mysterious element here in the first episode, but that leaves the pilot very flat and uninteresting. In the end, Beth runs into a falsely imprisoned Tony Jules Latimer (despite Beth making asses, of course). And no deal is made even then.
There’s a rainbow of redemption here for Beth as she (hopefully) learns to stop being the oddly insulting fibre, but this first episode is so thin there’s almost no reason to continue.
The Guilt Party follows Beth Burgess (Kate Beckinsale), a discredited journalist who desperately tries to save her only career by clinging to the story of a young mother, Tony Plimpton (Jules Latimer). Who will live for her mutilation and murder. husband Sentenced to prison. A crime he claims he didn’t commit. Beth battles Colorado gun smugglers, bait culture, marriage stagnation, and her tainted past is trying to uncover the truth.
