‘Quantico’ series premiere review: Does ABC have a hit with Priyanka Chopra drama?

ABC has done a great job over the years of marketing these sort of big, buzzy dramas with diverse leads and constant twists and turns. The more you think about it, the more that “Quantico” seems perfect to be on Thursday night.

Unfortunately, that did not happen for the show, and we are not entirely sure just how this is going to fare on Sunday nights. It’s a competitive spot, and without many big names in the cast, we’re not entirely sure just how much attention it will receive from the public. That’s a shame, since this is one of the more promising pilots of the fall season. For one, Priyanka Chopra is one of the potential stars of the fall season as Alex Parrish, a new agent-in-training at Quantico who finds herself suddenly roped into a mass conspiracy revolving around the biggest terrorist threat in New York City since 9/11.

The pilot has a distinct “How to Get Away with Murder” feel to it, mostly in that you are jumping back and forth between two different periods of time and trying to solve a mystery. Right now Alex is perceived by many within the FBI as the lead suspect, and given most of the evidence around her, we understand why. Yet, we are lead to believe she is still innocent, and it will take us piecing together some hints from her training to start to understand why.

Two of the more compelling supporting characters and therefore suspects are Shelby Wyatt, a woman seeking to make something of herself after the death of her parents, and Caleb Haas, who buckled massively under the pressure and nearly died after exposing one of the other recruit’s biggest secrets. He is mostly there thanks to prestige.

It’s still very early in the series, and thanks to that, we don’t have a sense of everyone yet. Granted, we do find little elements from the “twin twist” (it’s like this season of “Big Brother”) to simply seeing what the Quantico training is seemingly like. While we’re not sure how well the time-jumping is going to work long-term and the hook-up at the start of the pilot was completely unnecessary, this is still for the most part a solid introduction to a story. It’s certainly a show that we’ll be checking out every week. Grade: B+.

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