I’ve watched six episodes of Prime Video’s Countdown so far, more than enough to say it’s one of the year’s worst series. The show has already lost two of my colleagues, who couldn’t make it past episode three. It only gets worse. I get that the line between network and streaming TV continues to blur, but what is a bad CBS procedural doing on Prime Video? And not just bad, serialized and nonsensical.
The series comes from Derek Haas, who once wrote decent scripts (3:10 to Yuma, Wanted) before apparently getting paid by the word. Haas is the guy behind Chicago Fire, Chicago PD, and Chicago Med, and he’s not just a showrunner — he writes a ton of the scripts. But based on Countdown, which he created and writes entirely, it’s all filler. He’s mastered the illusion of momentum while delivering nothing. It’s all noise, like someone who talks a lot but says absolutely nothing.
Countdown plays like Energy Vampire: The Series. It drains and drains and gives nothing back.
But what is actually happening? Other than Nathan Blythe (Eric Dane) assembling a special task force to investigate something? The plot is buried in clutter. Take one episode: Jensen Ackles’ character, Mark Meacham, goes undercover as a prisoner being transferred so he can break another prisoner out and follow him to a building where his uncle works. That leads to a massive shootout, a building burning down, multiple deaths (including someone from the task force), and the only thing they gain is a quick glance at a Post-It note with the name “Gallager” on it. That single Post-It is basically the series’ driving clue.
In six hour-long episodes, here’s what’s happened in a nutshell: Blythe assembles a task force to investigate the murder of a Customs and Border Patrol agent (played by Milo Ventimiglia, who’s gone after five minutes of screen time). That leads to what they think is a cartel drug shipment. But surprise! It’s not drugs — it’s “fissile material,” a fancy way of saying bomb parts. Someone says “fissile material” at least twice per episode.
So they pivot to investigating the cartel, which takes up a whole episode and ends with a dying cartel member croaking out, “Volchek.” Now the show is about finding Volchek before he detonates a bomb in Los Angeles. Each episode is a loop: they follow a thin lead (like the Post-It) that maybe, possibly, will bring them one step closer to Volchek. We already know who Volchek is — his storyline unfolds in parallel as he assembles his bomb — and yet we still don’t really know what he wants.
And that’s the show. Also, Meacham has a brain tumor that gives him headaches, and another agent, Amber Oliveras (Jessica Camacho), is trying to stay clean after getting hooked on drugs during a previous undercover op. Eric Dane spends most of his screen time muttering phrases like “fissile material” and rattling off acronyms for federal agencies in a clipped growl. The rest of the task force is made up of cardboard cutouts.
Each episode is about 50 minutes of padding—lifeless action scenes, endless car rides, monotonous office banter that goes nowhere, and then five people die, and they discover one new clue in a tedious scavenger hunt that may or may not lead them to Volchek, a Belarusian caricature with unclear motives.
It’s like if “Netflix bloat” got its own show. It has a 72 percent audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’ll probably run for 12 seasons.
