With a title like Blood & Oil, you might picture Daniel Planview or perhaps a slogan written on the placard of an Iraqi War protestor. Meanwhile, looking at one of the show’s ads may call to mind soap opera dramas of the past like Dallas. Neither of these things make the show seem very interesting or original… and that’s probably because it isn’t.
The show stars Don Johnson — perhaps best known for his work on Miami Vice or Nash Bridges — and Gossip Girl alum, Chace Crawford. Given the latter’s past work, perhaps that’s why the first act felt more like a CW show than the aforementioned Dallas remake I was expecting (although I guess they already did that). On that note, while Johnson is the biggest name, the pilot episode belongs to Crawford.
Crawford plays Billy LeFever alongside Rebecca Rittenhouse as his wife, Cody. The show opens as the young couple sets out to North Dakota to take advantage of the booming oil-based economy that promises riches for those who stick around. However, they soon realize that making a quick buck might be a little bit harder than they once thought.
Meanwhile, Johnson’s character, Hap Briggs, is a tycoon looking to get his son, Wick (Scott Michael Foster), to fall in line and stop mooching off of Hap’s hard work. Briggs and LeFever cross paths more than once as the latter tries to create a life for himself in town and hold down a job. Of course, it should be no surprise to anyone that the series promises many more interactions to come between the two top-billed leads.
Admittedly, I enjoyed this pilot a bit more towards the end than I did at the beginning. This is mainly thanks to one sequence in particular that shows a clever (if not foolish) side of LeFever and makes you want to root for him. However, I found the show to be rather bland overall. In researching for this review, I discovered that the show has actually been in the pipeline (if you will) for some time, even bouncing over to USA under the title Boom for a while. It’s a shame they didn’t go with that title, because then I could say that it should have been called Bust instead… but I guess I just did.
One growing theme amongst pilots lately is that they feel like they should be movies instead of TV shows. I’d say that’s true of Blood & Oil as well, but it would be a second rate Nicholas Sparks film. The only difference between the show and one of the predictably tear-jerking Sparks’ films is that, while I can’t imagine a lead character dying in the first season, I fully expect the entire program to get killed off soon enough.
Blood & Oil premieres Sunday, September 27th at 9 p.m. on ABC