Henry Spivey is your typical suburban dad -- corporate job, pretty wife, scruffy dog, two kids, and a vague sense of dissatisfaction with his boring life.
Edward Albright is a highly skilled international operative -- runs a 4-minute mile, speaks 13 languages, trained to kill in countless ways.
What Henry doesn't know (but Edward does) is that they share a single body (Christian Slater, having great fun with the dual role). Henry is an artificially created personality, carved out of a spare corner of Edward's brain. When Edward isn't on a mission, he's "put to sleep" and Henry takes over; when the Janus organization needs to send Edward off to recover the microfilm or save the scientist or stop the nukes from going off, he's "awakened" for the mission. After the mission, phony memories of a business trip to someplace like Akron are created for Henry.
But alas for Janus, the Henry/Edward boundary is beginning to break down; Edward's waking up when he hasn't been summoned. Even worse, Henry's consciousness is taking charge in the middle of Edward's mission. This is very worrying to Edward's boss, Mavis (Alfre Woodard), and to his best friend, fellow Janus operative Raymond (Mike O'Malley, surprisingly effective in a dramatic role). Raymond's alter-ego, Tom, is Henry's best friend, and works in the same anonymous office, which seems to exist only to give Janus alters someplace to believe that they work.
Slater's quite good in the double role, vaguely pathetic as Henry and highly efficient as Edward; it's always clear which personality is awake, and Slater's especially good at capturing Henry's panicked confusion when he awakes mid-mission for the first time.
The biggest problem with the show is the glaring question which goes not only unanswered, but unasked, in the first episode. Why? If you're a highly skilled International Man of Mystery type, why do you need to partition off a piece of your brain to create an ordinary-guy alter ego?
That's not the only logic problem. The show opens in Paris, where Edward is facing off against a femme fatale agent, who we're lead to believe is every bit his equal in skill and smarts, but who is dumb enough to fall for the body-made-of-bedpillows trick.
It feels as if the writers came up with the two guys/one body concept and didn't take the time to think through the logical consequences of the idea. The show doesn't have much respect for the intelligence of its audience. Slater and Woodard are entertaining enough to keep me watching for another week or two in the hopes that some of these questions will be addressed, but if they aren't, I won't stick around for long.
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