so I watched Episode 1 of "FUBAR" (not a real review)

"FUBAR," the Netflix action-comedy series starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Monica Barbaro, can best be described as cute. The initial premise is that Schwarzenegger's character, Luke Brunner, is a CIA agent about to retire. What Luke doesn't know is that his daughter Emma (Barbaro), the apple of his eye and a top achiever her whole life, got recruited by the CIA a while back, and she's been a full-time agent for four years. Up to now, the Agency has been at pains to hide their active status from both Brunners, but Emma's current mission has gone sideways; she's about to be betrayed, and she needs to be extracted, so Luke is pulled from near-retirement to rescue Emma, whom he initially knows only by her code name, Panda. Luke's discovery of Emma's true job happens a bit before Episode 1's halfway point, and the rest of the hour is about how the two are going to leave the enemy compound with another trapped family that also wants to escape (we end on a cliffhanger).

So the premise of the show isn't that Luke and Emma don't know what the other does; the premise is that these two have lied to each other for years, so the rest of the season will be about how they work out the kinks in their father-daughter relationship while staying on mission. In all, now that I've seen Episode 1, I think the show isn't bad, but it's a bit slow, it lacks any real suspense, and it doesn't quite strike a clear tone. Is this a gruesome, bloody action-comedy? A family drama? A character study? It seems to want to be all of those things at once, and the result is a muddle.

Emma is hard-bitten and cynical, so when she sees her father kicking ass in a jungle, she's utterly unshocked about this. Remember how surprised Matt Dillon's character was in "Target" when he found out his father (played by Gene Hackman) could speak French and use a car as an offensive-driving weapon? There's none of that here. Luke gets plenty of 80s-era one-liners, plus the catchphrase "That's it and that's all," which is apparently a throwback to "Throw Mama from the Train," starring Danny DeVito. Luke works with a three-person support team, but with the father-daughter relationship being so central to the show, the team members don't register that deeply. The humor is generally lighthearted, but I laughed out loud only once. Better scriptwriting and characterization could have made this a much sharper, funnier, more suspenseful show. I'm not sure I'm interested enough in what feels like a "True Lies" retread to want to continue with the series, and given the many so-so and negative reviews of it, it doesn't seem worth pursuing, even with Monica Barbaro being a knockout. (I've always been more partial to brown-eyed brunettes than to blue-eyed blondes.)

So that's a nein for "FUBAR," but this therapy scene from later in the season is kind of funny.