Red Widow (ABC) - Series Premiere: Synopsis and Review
‘Red Widow’ stars Radha Mitchell (‘Silent Hill’) as Marta Walraven. Marta’s husband works in organized crime, something Marta hates. However, after her husband gets killed, she has continue his work to protect her family.
A man, whom we will later know as Irwin Lazarev (Wil Traval, ‘All Saints’), steals drugs from a few men who work for Schiller (Goran Visnjic, ‘ER’). Irwin kills these men so no one will know he stole the drugs. Irwin works for Evan (Anson Mount, ‘Hell on Wheels’), Marta’s husband, and when he finds out what Irwin has done, he’s really angry. Schiller is not a man to mess with; he would do anything to get his revenge.
Marta finds out Evan is more involved in the business than she anticipated. She wants him to quit, but he tells her it’s not that easy. However, he tells her he’ll quit if that’s really what she wants. But once he does, they will have to leave everything behind and never come back. Marta wants Evan to quit, but the next morning Evan is killed in front of their house.
Marta learns Evan is killed because one of his ‘employees’ stole Schiller’s drugs. Marta wants to give the drugs back to Schiller and make amends. However, she doesn’t know where the drugs are so she goes to Schiller with money instead. Marta hopes he’ll accept the money and leave her family alone. However, Schiller tells her she can pay her debt by importing a load of drugs, just once, or he won’t leave her and her family alone.
‘Red Widow’ is based on a Dutch show called ‘Penoza’. This show is doing pretty well in The Netherlands and Belgium. Because ‘Red Widow’ is based on an existing good show you’d expect the storyline to be well written. After all, they did have a good example which they could edit to make it even better. This seems to be exactly what they did. The first episode was a good way to introduce all the characters and at the same time the story got up to speed fairly well. Usually a new show only manages to do one of those things.
Schiller said he would leave Marta and her family alone if she would do just one thing for him. However, the series would be over really quick if this was indeed the case. It will take one, maybe two episode to get Schiller the drugs and then Marta wouldn’t have to protect her family from Schiller anymore. It is quite improbable this will be the case, it is very likely this deal will not work out for some reason or that Schiller wasn’t the one who killed Evan but someone else. This would mean Marta still doesn’t know why her husband was killed. Schiller did say he didn’t kill Evan, and that it wouldn’t make sense to kill him before he had his drugs back. All in all this means ‘Red Widow’ might not be as straightforward as it seems to be.
Overall the show looks pretty good. The storyline is good and there are a lot of possible angles which can be explored in the future. Most of the actors are doing really well too, only the kids are sometimes pretty bad, especially Jakob Salvati as Boris in the emotional scenes. Although this is understandable, the kid is just eight years old, this does make these scenes less dramatic and more annoying.
Red Widow premieres on March 3, 2013 at 9/8c on ABC.

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