Tokyo Vice: Can a TV Show Afford to Start Slow in 2022?

The premiere episode of Tokyo Vice — HBO Max's new drama series based on the 2009 memoir by Jake Adelstein and starring Ansel Elgort as a young American looking to break into journalism at Tokyo's most prestigious newspaper — features an eye-opening moment meant to grab the viewer's attention and get them invested in the drama onscreen. Unfortunately, it happens 48 minutes into a 58-minute pilot, after taking a gloomy, leisurely, some might say plodding course to get there. The moment itself is a shocking act of violence that grabs Elgort's character and shakes him to his core, but the show so takes its time getting there that by the time it does, the audience may well have checked out.

At this moment in time, there has never been more intense competition for viewers' attention; from the traditional broadcast networks, cable, premium cable, streaming subscription services, YouTube, TikTok, and whatever new thing that's just been invented in between my writing this sentence and you reading it. And yet at the same time, TV shows — hourlong dramas in particular — are more likely than ever to take their own sweet time telling their stories. To be clear: this isn't necessarily a bad thing. At least not qualitatively. TV shows like Sharp Objects and Rectify have taken their time to tell stories without feeling the need to electro-shock their audiences into paying attention, and it worked for them. But not every show can make the slow burn work; more often, a show that takes too long to get interesting is going to lose out simply because audiences don't have to look very far to find something more interesting. The tried and true "it gets good around episode 5" recommendation has become a red flag in an environment where those five hours could be spent catching up on any number of shows you haven't gotten to yet that are more immediately gripping.

What's ironic is that back when there were fewer TV shows competing for attention, TV pilots behaved as if they were in a life-or-death battle for our attention spans. The Lost pilot kicked off with the loud aftermath of a plane crash. ER's pilot was a nonstop hour (88 minutes, actually) of constantly moving tension. Six Feet Under kicked off with the death of the family patriarch, Alias had Sydney Bristow's fiancé assassinated, and Game of Thrones shoved a kid out of a castle tower.

But as television has become more cinematic, it's also become moodier and less beholden to the old ways of grabbing viewers' attention. Again, this can pay artistic dividends. Tokyo Vice kicks off with a flash forward of a tense meeting between Jake (Elgort) and Detective Katagiri (Ken Watanabe) with a Japanese crime boss who threatens Jake's life if he runs a story. From there, the episode flashes back two years, to when Jake is studying to take the exam that will hopefully score him a job as a journalist with Tokyo's top newspaper. The flash-forward opening is meant to pique viewers' interest, but we're mostly kept at arm's length about what exactly Jake's story is about — the better for us to be surprised when it happens in the episodes to come.

The vast majority of the pilot is spent following Jake as he studies for his exams, takes his exams, interviews for a job, and starts said job. All the while, the focus is intensely on Jake, and thus Elgort, an actor who even before he went under the microscope following allegations of bad behavior and sexual misconduct wasn't exactly known for being the most outwardly expressive performer. Even in the recently Oscar-nominated West Side Story, where he's honestly pretty good in the role of Tony, he's quite easily usurped at every turn by the film's ensemble. Tokyo Vice doesn't feature its ensemble well enough to compensate for the low-charisma void at its center. Rather than invest more heavily in its supporting characters, the show chooses instead to treat Tokyo and is rainy afternoons and neon nightlife as its own character. Jake butts up against heavy institutional resistance to his taking the reporter job as an outsider, and when he tries to report on what is self-evidently a murder, he's smacked down by his superiors and told by one of the few cops who will talk to him that there are no murders in Tokyo. None called as such, that is.

The pilot itself is plenty stylish. Perhaps inevitably, given its title, the episode was directed by Michael Mann, who put his stamp on not only the Miami Vice TV series in the '80s but the visually dazzling and largely misunderstood feature film that disappointed at the box office in 2005. There's no doubting Mann's talents with a camera, but even he can't make the Jake/Elgort problem at the center of this show work. By the time he hits that 48-minute mark, where Jake sees the horrifying extent to which the yakuza have a grip on Tokyo's criminal workings, there's a good chance his audience has checked out.

This spring's more successful TV shows haven't exactly been empty-calorie sugar highs. Apple TV+'s Severance took its time building its world out, too, but it also kicked off with a woman waking up in the middle of a conference room with no memories. HBO Max's Minx — while, yes, a comedy, so it's a different beast — front-loaded its pilot with a montage of penises, as befitting to its smut-magazine subject matter. These aren't crass gambits; they're good TV shows that display a keen awareness that there's just too much competition out there to think you can slow-play your TV show the way Tokyo Vice seems to think it can. You really hope Ansel Elgort can break his big story about the Japanese mob, but odds are you won't be there to see it happen.

The first three episodes of Tokyo Vice premiere on HBO Max Thursday April 7th. New episodes drop Thursdays through April 28.

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Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.