FX
Time and interest permitting I may do a regular (or semiregular) Lights Out Watch here as the season goes on. Having some catching up to do, however, and having written about 1500 words on the show in my review this week, I’ll leave further breaking down of the pilot to you. I will say that I liked the pilot a great deal, but it took a couple of episodes for me to really get a sense of where the show is going. (That’s probably largely a result of the fact that the pilot was years in the works and was considerably rewritten, recast and reshot.)
Later episodes do more to reconcile the guy-who’s-hit-bottom story with the more traditional boxing-comeback story. I did particularly enjoy, however (mild spoiler), how the pilot held back on the scenes of violence (in the dentist’s house and the parking lot) and then cut to them at the end. Not only did they establish Lights as, still, an effective fighter, they also held us suspended us for a few minutes in a limbo where Light could be The Kind of Guy Would Would Do This Thing, or he might not. By the end of the pilot we’ve seen both very good and very bad sides of him. Did it hold your interest?