‘Lights Out’ boxing drama on small screen
Los Angeles Times
From “Gillette’s Friday Night Fights” in the 1950s to the birth of pay-per-view and premium cable and the wide world of a thousand channels of sports, television has had a long and fruitful relationship with boxing. But it’s rarely been the subject for drama.
FX would seem to be the most likely network to test the genre. And so they have, with “Lights Out,” a 13-episode series beginning Tuesday about a former heavyweight champion trying to come back after five years out of the ring.
It is something shy of electrifying and not always convincing, but it pulls you right along and offers too many good moments and fine performances not to recommend it.
Oddly, the central role provides the least flash. As 40-ish Patrick “Lights” Leary, Holt McCallany gives an opaque, somewhat stolid performance that finally does befit a character whose main occupation, even more than boxing, is to assure the people around him that everything is fine or will be, even when they aren’t and may not be: the wife who asked him to retire (Catherine McCormack), the father who trains him (Stacy Keach, memorably a boxer himself in John Huston’s “Fat City”), the brother who has mismanaged his money (an excellent Pablo Schreiber), his daughters and poorly conceived reporters, there just to cause trouble.
Leary sometimes makes bad decisions. But there is a wholesomeness to him, perhaps not to be unexpected from the show’s creator, Justin Zackham, author of “The Bucket List.”
“Lights Out” premieres at 10 p.m. Tuesday on FX. It is rated TV-MA-LSV.