
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaVpKVDeQEE[/yt]
The half-hour comedy premiered Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 9:30 pm on FOX.
Breaking In is about a high-tech security firm that takes extreme, and often questionable, measures to sell their protection services.
The show is executive produced by Adam Sandler and stars:
- Bret Harrison (Reaper. V) as Cameron Price
- Alphonso McAuley as Cassius "Cash" Sparks
- Trevor Moore as Josh Armstrong
- Christian Slater as Oz
- Odette Annable-Yustman (Cloverfield) as Melanie Garcia
- Michael Rosenbaum (Smallville) as Dutch, Melanie's boyfriend
Metacritic reviews and score.
Watch the full premiere episode on Hulu.
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Minor spoilers about the characters follow.
Now that that's all out of the way, while I found the premiere episode a bit subpar from a humor standpoint, and the half-hour format really makes the "mission" plots too rushed, there are a couple things that I think will appeal to fans here.
The first is that three of the characters (fully half the cast) are unabashed Trekkies. Christian Slater should be obvious since he's a Trekkie in real life, and his team leader Oz actually owns Captain Kirk's chair from TOS and conducts meetings from it (while telling Harrison's character Cameron he can't sit in the chair). He acquired the chair by doing a job for William Shatner, who was being stalked by Alphonso McAuley's character Cash in full Trek regalia. Cash dresses up as Spock and Han Solo, goes to cons, wears genre t-shirts, and spouts frequent inside references when he's not hazing the new guy.
The other reason some here might want to check it out is that Smallville's Michael Rosenbaum returns with all his hair as the douchebaggy Hummer-driving boyfriend of Odette Yustman's Melanie / other end of an obvious future love triangle with Cameron. He has a job selling clean urine to people taking drug tests.
The premise of the show is essentially a wackier version of the security testing company in 'Sneakers,' with similar character tropes (though a much younger cast). There's the enigmatic team leader, the young hacker, the intelligence guy, the safe-cracker, etc. They recruit or blackmail minor criminals and flakes into working for the group to test the security of various corporations. The first mission involves testing the security of a high end car dealership by stealing a car, and of course things go wrong and hi-larity ensues.
As I said, the show is a bit rushed in the half-hour format, to the point where the mission is shown happening through a series of flash forwards as the characters were still mapping out the plan. For people who enjoy the technical aspects of such shows, there's not much to see here. Unfortunately it also failed to really bring a lot of laughs (the Trekkie/Star Wars stuff was fun, though), but that could be a result of having a large cast to introduce in the premiere episode. I'll give it another shot next week to see how the show does with a less exposition-heavy episode.