‘State of Affairs’ premiere: Are there too many cooks on Katherine Heigl’s series

…And we’re not talking here about awesome viral video from earlier this month.

Come Monday night, NBC is taking probably its biggest gamble of the entire fall season, and releasing a show entitled “State of Affairs” in a timeslot following “The Voice.” This is the big return of Katherine Heigl to TV following her time on “Grey’s Anatomy,” where she made a name for herself in both fortunate and unfortunate ways.

Overall, though, our initial take on “State of Affairs” is this: Heigl is not the problem with the show so much as it is everything else behind the scenes. Early buzz has expressed some concerns with the pilot being a little too scattered all over the place, which brings us back to “too many cooks.” There are a ton of producers on this show, including Heigl and her mother, and almost all of them have their own ideas. We’d cut that list of producers in half, and maybe you have a better show in the end.

Then, there is the premise of a woman working closely with the President to stop matters of national security, while at the same time struggling with her personal life. Basically, you already have “Madam Secretary,” “Scandal,” and “Homeland” that are all variations on this theme already. All have female leads, and many of the characters have complicated lives away from work.

We’ll be interested to see how the ratings for this show come in tomorrow morning. While we’re not the biggest Heigl fan, she is talented enough to carry a show on her own. We’re just not sure this is the show for her. We would’ve went with something completely original, where the entire success / failure ratio would not depend solely on her name in the credits. Without her presence here, we’re not sure anyone would be mentioning this show at all.

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