Fiction is filled with criminals who lead bifurcated double lives, but Angelo Doyle (Patrick Dempsey) takes this to an extreme. By day, Angelo is a suburban salesman mourning his late wife and helping his daughter Maria (Odeya Rush) prepare for the birth of her first child, all while wearing a quarter-zip vest that screams “dorky dad.” But when it’s time for his real job, Angelo transforms. The vest comes off; the Italian, custom-tailored suit comes on. The station wagon gets parked at an abandoned-looking garage where it’s swapped out for a Porsche. And Angelo drives into New York City, where he gets paid to kill people.
What makes Angelo’s situation so unusual is that he doesn’t just hide his job from his family, but also his family from his job. Angelo’s handler Dutch (Michael Imperioli), a chef who’s somehow tapped into the underworld, has no idea his former schoolmate ever married, let alone is widowed. Dutch does know about Angelo’s brother Michael (Richard Clarkin), who’s in a home with advanced dementia— but just because his existence predates the split. Only when Angelo starts to show early signs of the same illness that’s left Michael unable to speak in full sentences does the rigid, long-lasting divide between his two worlds start to come crashing down.
“Memory of a Killer” was developed by Ed Whitmore and Tracey Malone and inspired by the 2003 Belgian film “De Zaak Alzheimer,” which was in turn adapted from a novel. (Aaron Zelman and Glenn Kessler serve as day-to-day showrunners.) Yet unlike “Best Medicine,” another Fox midseason debut adapted from an international title, “Memory of a Killer” doesn’t translate its compelling logline into the vernacular of American TV. Disjointed and bland in the two episodes provided to critics in advance, this assassin drama has some execution issues.
To start, Dempsey convincingly plays only one of Angelo’s two faces. The former McDreamy plays the forced, upbeat enthusiasm of repressed grief well enough, but when it’s time for Angelo to return to his Eye-talian, mafia-connected roots, he’s out of his comfort zone — especially opposite a legendary “Sopranos” alum like Imperioli, who’s essentially playing Artie Bucco, the proprietor of Tony’s favorite restaurant. (By contrast, in the home scenes, it’s a wooden Rush who seems outmatched by Dempsey.) It’s impossible to believe Angelo’s kept up this deception for decades when the audience can’t buy in for the length of a single episode.
If “Memory of a Killer” can’t find the realism in Angelo’s objectively implausible setup, it could at least lean into the fantasy. But when the hitman’s cognitive decline starts to manifest, the slippage between reality and delusion is played disappointingly straight. Angelo forgets passcodes and gets lost in a forest, symptoms helpfully foreshadowed for him by one of Michael’s nurses. The objectively amusing ways such slippages can cross over with his chosen profession — like leaving a gun in his pied-a-terre’s refrigerator, where it’s discovered by a one-night stand — aren’t played for laughs. Nor is there much visual experimentation to show how Angelo experiences his crumbling reality.
Angelo’s targets and adversaries are a succession of generic organized crime tropes: the mobsters’ accountant; a Chinese American gangster. With the exception of a hand-to-hand fight sequence in an elevator, there’s little intrigue to his exploits. The great Gina Torres is a welcome presence as an FBI agent investigating a shooting that brings the violence of Angelo’s vocation onto his home turf. (Apparently, it took the mystery assailant a few days to figure out what his family and friends couldn’t for many years.) She’s still not enough to keep the crime elements of this show from feeling as half-baked as the character work. Angelo’s wife was killed by a drunk driver before the events of the show, and one gets the impression she was written out to spare the effort of imagining this stubbornly surface-level character in a long-term intimate partnership.
You never want to write a show off entirely based on just a few episodes, even a start as unpromising as that of “Memory of a Killer.” The remainder of the season could fill in Angelo’s backstory to explain how he got to this place, or use his illness as a way to look back on his choices and regrets. At least to start, however, the drama is a disappointingly flat take on its inherited premise. Angelo may be a killer, but the show he leads sure isn’t.
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“Memory of a Killer” premieres on Fox on Jan. 25 at 10 p.m. ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Mondays starting Jan. 26.
From Variety US