I have mixed feelings on Dan Brown's books, particularly the ones in the Robert Langdon series (I've grown tired of his messaging), but I love the movies The Da Vince Code and Angels and Demons (Inferno was awful). When I found out that Peacock was creating a Lost Symbol show, I was pretty excited. Then I learned that Tom Hanks wouldn't be reprising his role, and my excitement bottomed out.
Still, I'm going to give it a fair shake. The first two episodes are not promising, but there's still potential.
First of all, the showrunners made a poor decision to change where this story takes place in the timeline. Since they didn't get Hanks, they cast Ashley Zukerman. Zukerman is much younger, so the writers moved the timing of this story in front of the events in the movies. On the surface, the Langdon stories are pretty independent of each other, so it's not that big of a deal, but The Lost Symbol had a couple of fun self-referential moments that no longer can happen, so that's bummer.
The bigger problem, though, is the butchering of the Langdon character.
Zukerman just isn't fun to watch. He doesn't carry the same persona as Tom Hanks' Langdon. Hanks had a lightness to his knowledge; he somehow pulled off coming across as both giddy and annoyed simultaneously when someone expected him to have insight to a puzzle or symbol, as if he's some knowledgeable hermit who knows his expertise will come in handy to someone some day. That's why the cops come to Langdon, and he knows it. Zukerman, on the other hand, flaunts his knowledge arrogantly. He doesn't try to present information in a digestable manner for those who didn't waste many years at Harvard reading history books. Maybe that comes with youth; again, Langdon is younger in this show than we've seen before. But then again, this is how Dan Brown has operated his whole career. He'll research history, theories, and other related subjects, then clunkily present the relevant information in his story to ensure the readers know that they don't know what they need to know; Brown merely uses Langdon as his microphone. That's the difference here. Where Hanks teaches, Zukerman lectures.
The only remedy to make Zukerman's Hanks sufferable is having an equal, which is where Katherine comes in. Katherine is the daughter of Peter, Robert's mentor who has disappeared. She's brilliant in the field of noetic sciences (psychic/metaphysical stuff), which, of course, Langdon scoffs at (again, Hanks was never condescending to build himself up and put others down like that). Katherine can exchange wits at his level, and she definitely will have opportunities to educate him if the showrunners stick to the source material.
It did get better in the second episode when Langdon couldn't remember how to read Katherine's letter, which was written in Hebrew. Her letter was a secret letter her dad sent to her, and it led them to Waren, a long-time family friend who provides a hideout for Katherine and Robert while they're on the run from the goonies that captured Peter. Waren, of course, is connected to the Masons; Dan Brown's obsession with them knows no bounds. And thus, we are thrust into another adventure of unlocking past codes, hidden secrets, and long-lost maps that only a select few are aware of, including Peter, which is why he has been taken (an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade-like).
The rest of the second episode was a bit slower than the first, but it established family dynamics between Peter, Katherine, and her brother, Zachary. Zachary was in a Turkey prison, and Peter finally put his foot down and decided not to bail him out of a jam the way he always does. Of course, the one time he does that, Zachary ends up murdered while in prison, and Katherine blames her dad for that. Sheesh, that probably makes for awkward family Thanksgivings, huh?
The CIA agent in charge of the case, Inoue Sato, seems pretty stupid at times, but that could be because she's hiding something. She visits one of the guards in the hospital who got shot at the capitol, and she refuses to divulge harmless information that would've given the guard a peace of mind. That may come back to haunt her, because now this guard is trying to help Robert and Katherine go behind her back to find Peter by helping them smuggle Peter's secretive ring out of the evidence room. Should be an interesting angle to keep an eye on going forward. Sato also strongly discourages Langdon, Katherine, and Waren from helping with the case or solving clues and puzzles that could lead to Peter, but why?! What doesn't she want them to find out?
New episodes come out on Thursdays. Something to note: I was able to watch the first two episodes of the show for free on the Peacock app. But after looking into it, it appears you need a subscription to watch the whole show going forward. Guess I'll be jumping in for a couple of months until this show is over.
Notes:
-Watching Langdon and Katherine interact is very unsettling for me. We never really see the romantic side of Langdon in the previous books/movies, but now that he's younger, I definitely saw a flirtier side to him than I was prepared to handle. Their debate about whether the '70s or the '80s was the better decade was so awkward! The show already is set earlier than the other stories, and in the first two episodes, we've been flashing back to three years earlier, when Robert perhaps was still Peter's student. Peter invited Robert to a fancy dinner, and Katherine and the rest of his family are there, too. Even then, Katherine and Robert's chemistry was off.
-As a young professor, Langdon teaches a symbology class and shows some of the same clips he showed in Da Vinci Code when he was giving a presentation (including the Nazi comparison). Pretty lame.
-Am I the only one who thinks Zukerman looks like a cross between Jake Gyllenhaal and B.J. Novak?