Paramount+ (Formerly CBS All Access) is the best way to stream The Equalizer as the streaming service provides a live feed of your local CBS station and will let you watch new episodes when they air on CBS. She lives with her daughter and aunt (Lorraine Toussaint, barely visible in the pilot) and has an ad hoc team consisting of a former agency sharpshooter (Liza Lapira) and her hacker husband (Adam Goldberg), who work in a grand basement lair recalling a much better CBS drama, “Person of Interest.New episodes of The Equalizer air every Sunday at 8:00 p.m.
The biggest change in the structure of the story, in keeping with current practice for network procedurals, is that McCall isn’t the lone wolf of the earlier versions. (Laya DeLeon Hayes gives the show some energy as the daughter, who’s bewildered by her mother’s sudden unemployment.) The gender reversal of the action-figure protagonist doesn’t figure very prominently in the pilot, though McCall is now a single mother to a rebellious teenager. agent McCall is captured and questioned in a New York warehouse, the villains go to the trouble of waterboarding her.) (One example of the show’s level of wit: When the former C.I.A. CBS, in its outreach to critics, has tried to position the show as an exemplar of inclusion, female empowerment and concern for social justice, but so far that feels like lip service in dramatic terms, the show is “MacGyver” with fewer gadgets or “Magnum P.I.” without the beach. It takes a good measure of ingenuity and storytelling pizazz to pull that kind of thing off week in and week out Marlowe’s previous series, “Castle,” on ABC, had a modicum of those qualities, but the “Equalizer” pilot is too drab and limp to lift you past the implausibilities. boss (played by Chris Noth) in a prime example of the dialogue, alternately stiff and threadbare, she has to do battle with. “Everybody’s playing chess, nobody’s thinking about the living, breathing pieces that we sacrifice along the way,” she tells her former C.I.A. agent - who grew disillusioned with the government’s methods and retired. Like the male Equalizers played by Edward Woodward (in the original series) and Denzel Washington (in two films), Latifah’s Robyn McCall is a former intelligence operative - this time identified as a C.I.A. Latifah puts a human face on the formulaic silliness and incapacitates faceless bad guys with aplomb, but there’s nothing in the pilot that requires her to do anything but coast on her charm. And on the evidence of Sunday night’s premiere, the only episode available for review, CBS is firmly in control.
In the words of the ad the Equalizer uses to solicit clients - placed in a newspaper in the 1980s television series, on Craigslist in the 2014 film remake and on social media in the new series - the odds are against her. But will a CBS procedural drama give her the room to do anything besides cash checks for seven or eight years? When she cuts loose, in movies like “Bessie” and “Chicago,” she has a fierce and quick-witted swagger few performers can match. Hearing that Queen Latifah is playing the title role in a new iteration of “The Equalizer” - that combination of latter-day Robin Hood and action-movie vigilante - inspires equal measures of expectation and dread.