You Gotta Know When to Hold 'em

Last night was the season finale of ESPN's latest stab at original programming, Tilt. And if you didn't catch the promos where they contently mentioned it, Tilt is from the makers of Rounders. And if you didn't see the promos, you can tell just by watching the show with Eddie Cibrian doing his best Matt Damon impression. It almost seems that Eddie Towne could Mike McDermott before he gave up gambling. And they both were playing for revenge against the bad guy. I seemed to miss why Eddie, or Clark for that matter, held a grudge against the Matador, but that was one of many plot points I didn't pick up. But the big difference between the movie and show were the bad guys. Rounders had the cerebral villain in Teddy KGB where Tilt instead went for the mussel with Don 'The Matador' Everest. Both were perfectly cast. John Malkovich fit the intelligent poker player to a tee where Michael Madsen took being bad to an all new level pulling out all the stops to win short of cutting off some one's ear. In the token hot chick category, Rounders wins in a landslide. It was almost like they took the token hot chick from Rounders, gave her a couple whacks with the ugly stick, and then played her on Tilt. It was such a discrepancy, by the middle of the season they had to bring in a second token hot chick.

As a TV show, Tilt ran into some problems. As mentioned before, the show was had to follow at times and seemed to leave out some important information. They started off the show with an obvious swerve when the black guy attacks the white guy at the poker table. Looking back, the writer may have planned it to be obvious, as the Matador made reference to it after he turned on Eddie. Other burning question that were not answered or I just missed were what did the Iowa cop's brother do to get killed? Or why didn't Lowball threaten blackmail when he fired? Why did the Matador kill Skip himself while the tournament was going on? There were many holes that need to be filled. I even had to check out the website to see who killed themselves in the last episode.

Tilt did have many plot twists that I didn't see coming like killing Seymour off early. The big three being caught when the first tried to bring down the Matador. Clark's friend's secretary being FBI. And they save the best for last when it was revealed that the Matador threw the tournament. The final couple episodes was when the show as a whole pick up in the entertainment department with Norman Chad making he benign comments and the personal profile of the internet player who promptly got bounced in first round. Also, the last couple episode brought us an appearance of the Smoking Man playing a priest of all things.

Tilt 1.x get a on my Terror Alert Scale.