Review: NBC's 'Game of Silence' is muddled mystery

The games TV plays these days.

Faced with an unprecedented demand for scripted series, networks have wandered ever further afield for ideas they can adapt for American audiences. So you get The Killing and The Bridge from Scandinavia, The Slap and Rake from Australia — and NBC’s Game of Silence (Tuesday preview, 10 ET/PT, then Thursdays, 10 ET/PT,  ** out of four) by way of Turkey.

Now and then, these adaptions prove skillfully done, as with Homeland, based on an Israeli series. More often, however, the result is more akin to this disappointing Game: an insufficiently thought-out cross-cultural stew that lands neither here nor there.

We’re supposed to be in Texas, where four young best friends made a terrible mistake and are sentenced to a brief stint in a juvenile detention center. Under the malevolent watch of Warden Ray Carroll (Conor O’Farrell), the boys are brutalized and assaulted by fellow inmates and male guards, who force them to take part in fight clubs and sex parties.

No one doubts the horrors that can await boys in juvenile detention centers, though one would hope that if a prison actually became an organized mix of Midnight Express and Lord of the Flies, some parent or guardian would eventually notice. But as always with TV drama, the point isn’t whether something has or could happen — it’s whether the show presents it in a way that convinces you it did happen for the purposes of the show, a verisimilitude test this series, from creator David Hudgins, fails badly. Those early prison scenes are so wildly over-the-top, they border on farce — and send the series skittering off the rails.

Twenty-five years pass, and the friends have grown apart, until one of them spots and assaults one of the guards. Under arrest, he turns for help to the former leader of the group, Jackson (David Lyons), a successful lawyer with an equally successful fiance (Claire van der Boom). That draws Jackson back into a world he had hoped to escape, and into the old circle of Gil (Michael Raymond-James), Shawn (Larenz Tate) and Jessie (Bre Blair). It also entangles them once again with the warden and a former inmate (Demetrius Grosse) who's a landscaper by day, drug dealer by night.

Thrown back in the path of their tormentors, Jackson, Gil and Shawn are determined to bring them to justice. In the wake of Spotlight, you might think their best choice would be to go to a reporter, seek out fellow victims, and make their story public. This, however, is TV, so instead they decide to prove that Carroll was behind an unsolved murder.

That sets up a 10-episode mystery, as secrets are revealed and lives are lost. The twists hold some interest, as plot mechanics often do; the characters, less so. No one’s behavior makes much sense, and no one’s relationship ever rings true — particularly not the romantic ones, which are virtually chemistry-free across the board.

And no matter where a series is from, that’s a losing game.