And For My Next Trick, Presto!

Been watching NBC's The Cape (Mondays, 9-10 PM) and if you like your superheroes without the "save the world" baggage and all the mucking about with the timestream, Vince Faraday is the hero for you.

David Lyons plays Faraday, a ex-soldier, cop, and family man. One of the few honest cops left in fictional Palm City (which bears an interesting resemblance to L.A.) Faraday's life is destroyed when he's framed for the car bombing of the city's new police chief by a masked psychopath called Chess. Chess, it turns out, is billionaire businessman Martin Fleming, who is using his Chess persona to terrorize the city to have his Ark Corporation take control as the cash-strapped city's privatized police force. Fleming pins Chess on Faraday, and Faraday barely escapes Ark's SWAT goons with his life.

Thought to be dead by both Chess and his family, Faraday finds himself in Palm City's criminal underworld, falling in with a circus carnival that robs banks on the side, led by Max Malini (Keith David). Max takes Vince under his wing and teaches him a thing or sixteen about illusions and escape artist tricks, and just happens to have the greatest trick cape in the world. Vince then emerges from training as The Cape, based on his son Tripp's favorite comic book hero.

Things get pretty complicated for our bargain basement Batman here. Martin Fleming literally has his own private police army and controls the most of the city's crime as Chess as well, and Vince...well, Vince has a cape. Vince has an ally in Orwell (Summer Glau), a beautiful and intelligent hacker who has her own mysterious score to settle with Fleming, and they soon team up in a race to expose Fleming as Chess and to clear Vince's name before Fleming discovers Vince is alive and is really The Cape.

Through all this Vince keeps watch on his wife Dana and son Tripp, Dana, now a city public defender, often finds herself in possession of mysterious tips related to her cases, and Tripp gets to meet The Cape in person as Vince can only be Tripp's surrogate father through superhero advice dispensed on the rooftop of an apartment building.

If you enjoy good old fashioned pulp hero action, where the good guys have only their wits and their skill to take on an army of crime, then The Cape is your man. The series is pretty decent so far, The Cape's villains are far closer to Dick Tracy bad guys than anything on the level of Legion of Doom, but the series has a lot of heart and it's worth checking out on Hulu to catch up.

Try The Cape on for size.