‘Memory of a Killer’ Forgot to Save Something for Later

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Fox’s Memory of a Killer — for a broadcast network series, the pilot is actually decent — so much as it tries to cram way too much into its premiere episode, apparently because American audiences can no longer abide either a slow burn or even a regularly paced one. The series stuffs so much into the pilot that I’m concerned the rest of the season will too often sit in idle, having burned all the rubber in the premiere.

Patrick Dempsey stars as Angelo Doyle, a man living two completely separate lives. In one, he’s a mild-mannered father and widower whose pregnant daughter, Maria (Odeya Rush), is married to Jeff (Daniel David Stewart), a perfectly nice guy whose work irritatingly (to Angelo) generates no income. In the other, Angelo is a hitman for the mob, overseen by his handler, Dutch (Michael Imperioli). In one life, he drives a station wagon. In the other, a slick black car. He even has a garage out in the middle of the boonies where he switches from one existence to the other.

That alone should be enough to sustain a pilot episode. Angelo takes out a hit on the brother of a mob boss and then, later — against Dutch’s wishes — also kills the mob boss himself, Carl Mosher. Now he’s likely in hot water with Dutch and has probably sparked a mob war. Meanwhile, the man who killed Angelo’s wife informed on someone and was released early, so Angelo is grappling with that as well. By the end of the episode, someone — it’s not clear who — also tries to take out Angelo’s pregnant daughter.

Angelo keeps his two lives compartmentalized, save for discussions with his brother, who is in a care facility with Alzheimer’s and rarely speaks. Apparently, it’s genetic, because the other twist — and the reason for the show’s title, Memory of a Killer — is that Angelo himself is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. He’s starting to forget key codes, for instance, or accidentally leaving a gun in the refrigerator after bringing a hookup home. Oops.

It’s a lot, but to his credit, Dempsey does an admirable job balancing the competing storylines and personalities; his behavior around his daughter is clearly distinct from the one he adopts with Dutch. I don’t even mind the overstuffed pilot so much as what it suggests about the show’s future. The series is based on the Belgian film De Zaak Alzheimer, later remade as the Liam Neeson movie Memory. Note that those were movies, not broadcast network television series, which will almost certainly turn Angelo’s memory loss into a recurring weekly device inside a procedural framework.

If Fox wants this show to run for two or three seasons, it will have to stretch out the Alzheimer’s arc and find a way, week after week, for Angelo to narrowly escape the consequences of his own cognitive decline. I’m not saying it can’t work — it’s worked as a decade-long series now called America — but I’m skeptical. I could easily imagine Netflix pulling this off as a tight six-episode miniseries, but as a long-running network drama, Memory of a Killer feels like a premise already straining under its own weight.

‘Memory of a Killer’ premiered last night on Fox and will air on Mondays.