New crop of action shows pack a punch

Summer blockbusters may be a distant memory, but for anyone who loves action stories and action choreography, this fall’s television season is full of Halloween-come-early treats.

The idea that Hollywood is outpacing the movies has mostly been discussed in terms of the film actors who are signing up for TV shows they might have disdained in the past and the increasingly cinematic style some ambitious shows are adopting. But television is also catching up to the movies in another way, with a new group of shows proving that just because the screen is small doesn’t mean the action sequences don’t have a big impact.

The NBC drama “Blindspot” is about an amnesiac woman discovered in a duffel bag abandoned in Times Square. Her body has been covered in fresh tattoos, all of which are obscure clues linked to larger mysteries.

At first, Jane Doe (Marvel veteran Jaimie Alexander), as she’s known, is understandably tentative and traumatized. She’s confused about what’s happened to her and compliant as she’s taken through the paces of having her tattoos scanned and her body examined. But when she finds herself in danger, one thing about her past becomes very clear: At some point, someone trained Jane Doe to be a lethally effective fighter, and the training, if not the memory of how she received it, stuck.

“I have a huge fight background, so my own skill set, aside from my character’s, definitely influence my performance, and makes it possible,” Alexander said at the Television Critics Association press tour in August, explaining the difference between Jane Doe’s fight style and that of Lady Sif, the Asgardian warrior she plays in Marvel’s “Thor” movies. “I was a wrestler growing up. Lady Sif, her moves are very fancy, graceful, big and glittery, in a way. And this character’s hand-to-hand combat, brutally efficient, quick and realistic.”

Her interest in action isn’t just professional.

“I started the female (wrestling) team at my school to create an opportunity to learn self-defense for the young women in my grade and the grade below mine, and it just kind of started as a thing,” she told reporters. “I’ve always been sort of an activist in pro equality, and it was a skill set that I knew that I could advance in, so I wanted to start the team. As for my brothers and growing up in Texas, they definitely helped build the backbone I have today that definitely makes it possible for me to play characters like this.”

NBC has another action veteran at the heart of “The Player,” about a man named Alex (“Strike Back” star Philip Winchester) who is recruited by the mysterious Johnson (Wesley Snipes) to try to stop crimes while very wealthy people bet on the outcome.

“There are rules that let you do things and don’t let you do other things,” Winchester reflected in August of the difference between shooting action sequences for a cable network and working for a broadcast channel such as NBC. “ ‘Strike Back,’ we got a lot more stuff when we were in South Africa, Budapest. But, having said that, NBC and Sony have been amazing, and they said, ‘If you want to get in there and ride that bike, you want to do that stuff, go ahead.’ … This is a show where we’re bringing back ’80s action and we’re putting it television on a Thursday night, and we’re having a good time doing that.”

By ’80s action, series creator John Rogers said he wanted to restore a sense of grandeur and pleasure to television action.

“The original idea was … ‘ridiculous’ is a strong word. ‘Pulp’ is the word we really landed on when we were developing the show,” he said. “ ‘Pulp’ is any story that’s high-velocity, big characters making big decisions, big emotional stakes and every episode is a thrill ride. And it doesn’t matter what context it is. We just decided to do it within the genre of action … you’re showing up to have a good time and have your fun ride, so we’re going to knock your socks off every week.”

That meant casting actors who had fight experience and wanted to be in the scrum themselves, and building a weapons training program for Charity Wakefield, who plays Johnson’s associate, the evocatively named Cassandra.

“We’re really drawing from everybody’s experience,” Rogers explained. “Philip’s experience, doing ‘Strike Back’ was crucial for the pilot. … It’s him running down Hollywood Boulevard in his underwear. It is him doing as much as he can. We were lucky enough to get Wesley, who is, of course, a fantastic martial artist. The stunt guys had a very easy day the day they had their fight.”

If “The Player” is looking back three decades for inspiration, “Supergirl,” Greg Berlanti’s forthcoming superhero show for CBS, reached across to another continent. Like her more famous cousin Superman, Kara Danvers (Melissa Benoist) is an exile from Krypton. But unlike him, she arrived on Earth as a young teenager, fully aware of how her powers would function on this new planet. And she chose to stay in hiding, rather than using those abilities to change the course of events in her new home.

To design an action style that would make use of the fact that Kara can fly, and that would express her joy once she finally does start using her powers, Berlanti and his colleagues turned to wuxia movies, specifically to Ang Lee’s 2000 masterpiece “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” Kara can fly better than wuxia heroes, who are generally very skilled humans rather than actual superheroes, but wuxia provided a sense of how she might move in the air. And it’s a genre of fight choreography that emphasizes delicacy and precision as much as brute force, which makes it a nice fit for a lithe young female hero, rather than Marvel and DC’s muscle-bound supermen.

Variety in action choreography might not be the most meaningful form of diversity television can aspire to. But the different approaches new shows such as “Blindspot,” “The Player” and “Supergirl” are taking, along with Berlanti’s other superhero shows, “Arrow” and “The Flash,” mean that for action fans, an increasing number of nights are must-see TV.