Minority Report Mondays, 9 p.m., Fox.
The mind-bending future worlds created by legendary sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick tend to get smoothed out when his work is adapted for the big screen, and in its transition from a short story to a movie to a TV series, Dick’s Minority Report has managed to become a mediocre police procedural. Sure, it’s a police procedural set in a sometimes intriguing future world, but it’s neither the heady sci-fi experience of Dick’s writing nor the stylish suspense thriller of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 movie.
The concept of both the story and the movie—that a system called PreCrime prevents all murders before they can happen—has been dismantled, and now Dash (Stark Sands), one of the three psychics whose visions formed the basis of PreCrime, is just a regular dude with disturbing premonitions. He teams up with a detective named Vega (Meagan Good) to feed her information in secret, now that PreCrime is illegal.
A few clever sci-fi touches aside (Vega listens to Iggy Azalea because her dad turned her on to “the oldies”), Minority Report is a straightforward cop show, with a familiar dynamic between the eccentric genius and the by-the-book detective. It’s gone from counterculture literature to generic network TV.
