Four young captains of industry face the challenges of life and love.
James has just discovered that his wife and his boss were having an affair. Brody's wife is a shrew who insists that he buy Napoleons from her favorite Paris pastry shop for her birthday party. Duncan has the hots for his ex-wife, and an investigative journalist is snooping into that unfortunate incident with a cross-dressing truck-stop hooker. Karl has a super hot mistress, but lately she's getting awfully clingy; she even wants Karl to go with her for couples therapy.
The four of them are played by (in order) Michael Vartan, Christopher Titus, Dylan McDermott, and Joshua Malina, who are uniformly charming and attractive (though I admit, if I'd had my pick as to which one would get all the shirtless bedroom scenes in the pilot, I wouldn't have gone with Molina). They get the tone of the show right, a mix of light drama and comedy very reminiscent of Desperate Housewives, and the writing is relatively sharp.
The actresses in the supporting roles are just as good. Jessica Collins is very funny as the needy mistress, Marla; Peyton List finds precisely the right blend of contempt and insecurity as Duncan's teenaged daughter; and Nia Long, as James's co-worker (and inevitable romantic interest as his marital problems increase, I suspect), manages the tricky combination of being utterly professional and fabulously sexy at the same time.
But as well made as Big Shots is, it's just a little bit difficult to root for the show or its characters. "Gee, it's tough to be a handsome, rich, straight white guy" is not a message for which I have oodles of sympathy. Something as simple as making one of the four leads non-white would have made a huge difference. I may give it another week or two to see if the queasy factor diminishes at all.
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