The Box in the Living Room: Round 3
I actually like Law & Order, although I never watch the first runs, but to say the show’s storyline can be hit or miss is like saying batting against Roger Clemens can be hit or miss. Sometimes L&O is very good. Usually it’s decent. More often than it should be, it’s really dull.
When I say Cold Case is consistent, I mean that in both senses. For the most part you can turn on an episode and know what you’re going to get: An intro flashback setting up the crime/murder, a present-day setup where the team gets the case, title credits, several rounds of interviews where the flashback gets fleshed out or redefined, a hint of main character development, some intense scenes of police detectives doing their work, a breakthrough and the flashback is complete, ending the episode with a musical montage of fading flashback figures, police wrapping the case and people silently emoting.
But what’s interesting here is that for the most part these stories are well-written and interesting. Law & Order stumbles most often by trying to shoehorn an interesting courtroom idea (some legal hot-button issue) into a crime story and solve it in less than an hour. Cold Case just goes with the crime story and focuses on how the crimes impact people in less immediate terms. Law & Order or CSI show how crimes affect the perpetrators or the victims which is immediate, time-of-the-crime focus. Cold Case is more concerned with the people who have to move on after these events and how they change and shape them, what closure could bring to them and how they respond to old secrets.
The Cold Case season premiere was a typical Cold Case episode, neither startlingly brilliant nor anywhere close to disappointing, but somewhere in that nice zone where a show accomplishes exactly what it is trying to and counts that as success enough. The passing nod to the Hunter story from the end of last season was a nice epilogue to that short plot thread (most plot threads that pass between episodes are short) as she tosses the paper in the trash and gets right back to work. The new girl, Josie (Sarah Brown) is an interesting addition to the cast which already contains maybe one too many peripheral characters who don’t get sufficient screen time. Plus this throws off the two-two split for detectives when they go off interviewing suspects or witnesses. I’m not saying I have a particular problem with the new character or the actress, I’m just saying I agree with Vera: She’s trouble.
CSI
The season finale for CSI was close to the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen on this or any other show. And I’m including the episode of the Brady Bunch where Greg fools people into thinking aliens are coming with a whistle, a flashlight and a big piece of cotton stuck to his lip.
We have a member of the cast, a teammate, buried alive and running out of air. Earlier in the show’s run, we had a similar situation with someone who was just a regular victim. In that earlier episode, they got in a helicopter with a snazzy heat-detecting gizmo and they found that girl in like five minutes. Over the open desert. At night.
But when Nick is trapped in the oh-so-clever booby trapped coffin, no one mentions the helicopter thermal gadget. No one really does much besides sit and stare at the video feed from the webcam in the coffin. Of course they save him after a gratuitous two-hour drag during which the CSIs act like nothing more than drooling baboons the whole time and the end result is… the team gets back together?
I hoped that Quentin Tarantino’s misguided hand on last season’s ender would serve to just get the show back on track and let the rest be part of our collective pop culture nightmare of things that should not have been. But no, this season in the premiere we have dozens of references to Nick’s “ordeal” and a long scene of him acting… something about a bug on his arm. (Granted, the bug was the size of northern Wisconsin, but that’s not the point.)
The case here was a car flying through a house which was obvious once they showed the shot of the holes in both the front and the rear of the mobile home. And the big tire-sized and shaped divots in the ground on the backside.
Where CSI has started to make me wonder is that it doesn’t really work on the level of a mystery show. I mean, these aren’t exactly whodunnits, you know? We’re introduced to like two, maybe three possible suspects in the course of a show. In many cases, we don’t really even know who the true perpetrator is until he’s introduced late in the episode. Sorta hard for us to guess who the killer is when we don’t see him, right? I mean, the B case in the premiere wasn’t even solved. They knew who did it in an abstract sense, but they didn’t catch him or even really talk about it much once we heard about the cocaine in the cinnamon rolls.
The show used to work as an exercise in displaying how forensics helps to solve cases, but at this point we get it. We’ve seen these characters snap hundreds of photos, dust millions of prints, process images, examine blood spatter, align bullet entry/exit points, conduct autopsies, collect DNA evidence and shine their blue lights around so much that there is very little else to be shown until some new technique gets invented. So we don’t get much of a mystery, we’ve seen all the police-tech stuff, we’re not dealing with a character-driven show by any means so I have to wonder how many “Freaks that live in or visit Las Vegas” episodes there can possibly be before we just don’t care anymore?
Truth is, I don’t need a cheek swab to tell me that I’m getting bored already.
Grey’s Anatomy
The season premiere of this show dropped the soap so often I felt like what I needed to buy the writers for Christmas was soap on a rope. Meredith (oddly enough the show’s protagonist and least interesting or likable character) finds out her frowned-upon relationship with a co-worker is further complicated by him being married (but separated), she flips out and drowns in soul-crushed misery despite the fact that she’s been dating the guy for, what? A month?
Either way, a show about surgical interns that finds itself using relationship crises for conflict is already fishing around on the shower stall floor for that soap.
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