[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]
While the current news cycle might make the threat of a nuclear attack on US soil a bit tricky as a major plot point, two things can be true at the same time and Prime Video’s new action series, Countdown, is still a fun popcorn summer thrill ride diversion and a reasonable sibling to the streamer’s hit series Reacher. Set and filmed in LA, it follows an elite, hand-picked, inter-agency task force, code name Hurricane, to track down a terrorist and prevent him from launching an extinction-level event on the city.
The ensemble cast is headed up by Jensen Ackles, in full cowboy mode as Mark Meacham, an LA detective pulled from a dicey undercover assignment and brought into the task force by Eric Dane’s FBI Assistant Director Nathan Blythe, who’s a bit of a cypher — committed to the job and demanding of his team while readily joining them in the field.
He’s joined by:
- Blythe’s right hand man, Damon Drew (Jonathan Togo), a family man learning to set important boundaries between home and work.
- DEA agent Amber Olivares (Jessica Camacho), also sprung from a dangerous deep cover op, who comes in knowing more about Meacham than he’s comfortable with.
- LA detective Luke Finau (Uli Latukefu), who’s balancing what he can disclose to his family.
- FBI agent Keyonte Bell (Elliot Knight), who’s following in the footsteps of a barrier-breaking father and hoping to leverage the task force to ascend the ranks.
- Cyber expert Evan Shepherd (Violett Beane), who’s the most eager of the recruits to prove herself.
The drama is as much about the team, with a significant focus on Meacham, as the procedure of chasing down their target, Borys Volchek (Bogdan Yasinski), which puts them in a variety of precarious OMG WTF situations. It also spends a fair amount of time on that target, drilling into what converted him from a mild-mannered Eastern European paper pusher to a man hell-bent on revenge 6,000 miles from home.
I’ve seen the first 10 episodes, with the full first season slated for 13 episodes, and it moves at a good clip. Everybody on the board is fair game to be knocked off of it at some point, by the gig or by other means, which heightens the experience of investing in the characters and hoping they make it to the next episode.
I’m of course always in on Ackles, and it’s so good to have him back on a weekly series. I hadn’t paid enough attention last year to realize this commitment would preclude him appearing in more than the season premiere over on Tracker, and he leaves it all on the field here.
Countdown is created by showrunner and executive producer Derek Haas (One Chicago and FBI franchises). The first three episodes drop at 3:01 am ET on Wednesday, June 25, on Prime Video in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide, with new episodes dropping every Wednesday through to the season finale on September 3. Here are a couple of sneak peeks.
Photos courtesy of Elizabeth Morris/Amazon Content Services; video courtesy of Amazon Content Services.
