Angelo Ledda lives two totally separate lives — fearsome NYC hitman and sleepy upstate Cooperstown photocopier salesman and father. Both of them are threatened when he is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, a disease he already lost his older brother to.
“Memory of a Killer” was developed by Ed Whitmore and Tracey Malone and inspired by the 2003 Belgian film “De Zaak Alzheimer,” which was in turn adapted from a novel. (Aaron Zelman and Glenn Kessler serve as day-to-day showrunners.) Yet unlike “Best Medicine,” another Fox midseason debut adapted from an international title, “Memory of a Killer” doesn’t translate its compelling logline into the vernacular of American TV. Disjointed and bland in the two episodes provided to critics in advance, this assassin drama has some execution issues.
If “Memory of a Killer” can’t find the realism in Angelo’s objectively implausible setup, it could at least lean into the fantasy. But when the hitman’s cognitive decline starts to manifest, the slippage between reality and delusion is played disappointingly straight. Angelo forgets passcodes and gets lost in a forest, symptoms helpfully foreshadowed for him by one of Michael’s nurses. The objectively amusing ways such slippages can cross over with his chosen profession — like leaving a gun in his pied-a-terre’s refrigerator, where it’s discovered by a one-night stand — aren’t played for laughs.
