Now that we’ve seen the case of the week and con of the week format of The Catch, we’re wondering if they could have stretched out Alice and “Christopher’s” relationship a little (or a lot) longer!
The pilot of The Catch gave us only a small taste of Alice and Christopher/Ben as an engaged couple before dropping the bomb of Alice discovering that Ben had left. Then, The Catch, season 1, episode 2 gave us the first glimpse of what to expect from the show on a weekly basis: a dual procedural following a team of private investigators and also a team of con artists.
On top of the case of the week and the con of the week, there will be the underlying theme of Alice and Ben coping with the loss of their relationship while Alice tries to find Ben to make him pay for what he did.
The Catch has generally been well received so far, but one common criticism going around is that they gave away Ben’s betrayal too early. The whole premise of the show is built around it, so it was even revealed in the trailer! The question is, would it have been better to save this as a big reveal for the mid-season, or even the season finale?
Why they should have waited
If we had gotten to know Alice and Ben (I’ll just call him by his actual name to avoid confusion) as a couple for a while longer, it might help us to understand their loss a little better. We see Alice with her wounded pride and heart, but we don’t fully understand the betrayal that she’s feeling. We see Ben dealing with his confused feelings for Alice, but we can’t really comprehend the love that he feels for her.
It looks like we’ll be filling in some of the gaps of their relationship through flashbacks and Alice’s dreams, but it’s difficult to understand if Ben is acting/speaking from the heart or for the con at any given moment. It would have been interesting to see how conflicted he was at the time, and for what reasons, while juggling both Alice and Margot.
On another note, it would have been some extreme, edge-of-your-seat entertainment to watch Alice and Ben (as Mr. X) have close encounters for an entire season, never knowing when she would eventually find out the truth. It would make the betrayal and heartbreak feel much more real to the audience if the suspense had been built up in this way.
Why they did it right
If we had watched Alice and Ben’s love story unfold for an entire (or half) season, we would never have been able to get completely invested in it knowing what Ben was up to. Seeing every lie that Ben told to Alice would make it nearly impossible to turn him into a likeable character down the road. It would also make Alice seem less competent every time she failed to catch him in the act.
The suspense of waiting for Alice to find out Ben’s secret would get boring and annoying after a while. There would only be so many ways to set them up for “close calls,” so it would get repetitive. Since we would know she eventually had to find out, it wouldn’t be as exciting as it may seem.
Also, having the reveal set up for the end of season 1 could set The Catch up for failure in season 2 and beyond. If people fell in love with the cat and mouse game set up before the reveal, the huge change in format moving forward after Alice learned the truth could cause confusion and a feeling that the show could never live up to its initial intensity.
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