Posts Tagged ‘ crime dramas ’

ABC’s ‘Detroit 1-8-7′ Tries for Greater Realism, with Mixed Results

October 19, 2010
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ABC’s ‘Detroit 1-8-7′ Tries for Greater Realism, with Mixed Results

Having achieved success with medical dramas on Thursdays and situation comedies on Wednesdays, along with some popular reality shows, ABC has set its sights on another TV staple in the past couple of years: crime dramas. It has a winner in Castle (Mondays, 10 p.m. EDT) and experienced a couple of audience failures with two very good shows, The Unusuals and The Forgotten. All three of those shows were a little off the beaten path, a bit quirky, not the ordinary run of police procedural. Given the decidedly mixed results of that strategy (one that fits with ABC’s basic programming approach, which has mined the mildly quirky vein since the late 1950s), it’s no surprise that with Detroit 1-8-7 the Alphanet is trying a show much more in line with current-day police procedural formulas. And wonder of wonders, audiences like it, so far. Viewers gave it a B+ in the USA Today audience poll, second-best among the twenty-one series rated, and it finished second in its timeslot last week, behind CBS’s The Good Wife, with 7.4 million viewers (Good Wife having grabbed 11.8 million). Reviewers were less enthusiastic, giving it a 64 out of a 100 on Metacritic. The show

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NBC’s ‘Chase’ Strong on Moral Issues, Crime Show Formulas

October 18, 2010
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NBC’s ‘Chase’ Strong on Moral Issues, Crime Show Formulas

Both NBC and Jerry Bruckheimer Productions have hit some hard times in recent years. Bruckheimer’s signature programs—notably the CSI franchise—are past their prime, and recent series such as The Forgotten and The Whole Truth have failed to generate the hoped-for audiences. NBC has been mired in fourth-place among the broadcast TV networks and is struggling to recover from a series of blunders exemplified by last season’s Tonight Show disaster. Bruckheimer’s latest new series (one of two this year), the police drama Chase (NBC, Mondays, 10 p.m. EDT), is up against a big challenge: Monday Night Football on CBS, the established hit cop show Castle on ABC, and the new hit cop show Hawaii Five-0 on CBS. Add to that a relatively weak lead-in from The Event (which is getting killed in the ratings by ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and CBS’s Two and a Half Men), plus a lackluster reaction from those who have seen the show (a C+ rating in the USA Today audience poll—14th out of the 21 new shows), and things do not look good for Chase. That’s a pity because the show has some good things to offer. The central character is Annie Frost, a U.S.

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Weak Resolution Mars ‘Rizzoli and Isles’ Episode

July 27, 2010
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Weak Resolution Mars ‘Rizzoli and Isles’ Episode

Yesterday, you may recall, I pointed out two TNT crime dramas with overt political messages parroting Democrat Party/Obama administration talking points. So, naturally, TNT ran another such program last night. First, I will note that last night’s episode of The Closer was free of any political posturing. It’s good to see the program back on track after the previous week’s nonsense, and the episode was far more dramatically effective than its predecessor, as should be expected given the way didacticism tends to ruin fiction narratives. That happy event was followed by episode three of the new crime drama series Rizzoli and Isles, about a Boston homicide detective named Rizzoli (Angie Harmon, Law and Order, The Women’s Murder Club) and her friend, Isles (Sasha Alexander, NCIS). Each episode follows the two characters as they try to solve murder mysteries in Beantown. Last night’s episode dealt with the murder of a black teenage male. Intimations are made that he may have been murdered by a street gang with which he may or may not have been involved. Also under suspicion is a weird, local West African church which engages in rituals with voodoo overtones, the pastor of which is an ex-con who

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TNT Crime Dramas Push Political Points

July 26, 2010
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TNT Crime Dramas Push Political Points

I have long argued that contemporary U.S. entertainment offers a much greater variety of ideas and points of view than conservatives usually seem to realize, pointing out that many TV shows, movies, and music releases convey very sound values and ideas that traditionalists and lovers of liberty should appreciate. But there are still plenty of times when the producers of even good series that aren’t usually political (in contrast to, say, the intensely political Law and Order) have to take their jabs at the dangerously ignorant boobs they see as populating Middle America. Two crime dramas in the past week have done just that. Last week’s episode of The Closer, on TNT, set up a typical serial killer story but with an obviously political angle: the people being killed were all female illegal immigrants. Even more pointedly (spoiler alert), it turns out that the murderer is an agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) who chooses them as his targets because their lack of documentation makes it less likely he’ll be caught. The point of all of this is absurdly obvious, intended to suggest that illegal immigrants are unfairly singled our for abuse in the United States and made

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FX’s ‘Justified’ Rejuvenates Old-Fashioned Hero Type

May 12, 2010
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FX’s ‘Justified’ Rejuvenates Old-Fashioned Hero Type

Fox’s FX channel has a history of pushing the boundaries of “free cable” programming, with shows such as Nip/Tuck, The Shield, Rescue Me, Dirt, Damages, Sons of Anarchy, The League, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But although “edgy” material dominates FX’s original programming, the values and ideas of the shows are often rather laudable. It’s a technique many TV producers have adopted from 1970s genre films and perfected in recent years: adding titillating content to very traditional genre material that often reinforces values usually thought of as conservative. The latest example of this approach by FX is the new series Justified. Produced by Graham Yost (Speed, Boomtown, The Pacific) and based on a novel by Western and crime novel master Elmore Leonard (“Three-Ten to Yuma,” Mr. Majestyk, Get Shorty, Out of Sight), Justified stars Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood) as a U.S. Marshall, Raylan Givens, exiled to his hometown area in Eastern Kentucky after his questionable killing of a mobster in Miami. Givens is a straightforward hero without any phony psychological complexity, which in contemporary crime dramas generally serves to undermine the heroic nature of such characters and suggest that heroism is passé, no longer possible in a world in which moral relativism is not

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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