Even More TV Crime

I wish I could tell you that at the end of the day, I sit with a glass of sherry and read some improving literature. The fact is, though, that it's more likely to be a glass of beer (but a microbrew, so maybe that counts for something) and a crime drama on TV. Sure, I read plenty of books, but aside from history, I've pretty much abandoned improving books in favor of genre fiction, especially mysteries. Now that it's tax season, though, even that seems like too much work. I'd rather just let TV drama wash over me.

You already know what a complete fangirl I am for the late Veronica Mars. When I heard that its creative team, Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero, were venturing back into TV, I got excited. Then I heard it was to be a zombie show called iZombie. Yuck. I can't stand all that vampire/zombie/paranormal stuff. But I had to check it out, in spite of my aversion to that particular genre––and a fervent desire not to see anybody eating brains while I'm trying to digest my dinner.

It turns out that iZombie's protagonist, Liv Moore (played by Rose McIver), is basically a more grownup––and undead––Veronica Mars. Same snarky voiceover, same petite blonde pitbull attitude, same dark cloud following her around. The whole zombie thing keeps me from being totally in love with it, but I like it and it's on my DVR series queue.

The show begins with Liv as a smart and talented medical intern in Seattle who decides to take a night off to go to a party on a boat, at the urging of one of her intern colleagues. Liv isn't enjoying the party much and is about to leave when all hell breaks loose with people screaming, running, the boat on fire, you name it. Some guy attacks Liv and the next thing you know, she's waking up in a body bag on the beach and freaking out the one witness who sees her emerge from the body bag and stumble away.

It takes Liv a little while to realize that she's a zombie––though the pallor, circles around the eyes, strawlike hair and sudden craving for brains (with sriracha sauce, please; this is the 20-teens, after all) give it away. She switches to working in the Seattle PD morgue so that she doesn't have to kill anybody to access their gray matter. Her boss there, Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti, is the one person who figures out her secret and decides to figure out if he can cure zombie-ism. (That would look pretty good on a CV, right?)

Liv finds that when she eats a corpse's brains, the person's thoughts, feelings and attitudes flood into her consciousness, including, in some cases brief flashes of their murders. She wants to help the police solve the murder cases, but she can hardly tell them how she comes across her knowledge, so she claims to be a psychic. She ends up working with another snark-meister, Detective Clive Babinaux. Their relationship is the most frequent source of the show's smartarse repartée.

Rounding out the main cast is Liv's society matron mother, her best friend and roommate, and her former fiancé, Major Lilywhite (seriously, that's the character's name), whom she felt she had to break up with out of a fear that some evening she might be overcome by a desire to crack his head open and feast. No drama is complete without a nemesis, and Liv's is another zombie, Blaine DeBeers. Blaine has none of Liv's scruples about getting ahold of brains only from the already dead, and he's quickly turning into the creator of a Seattle zombie subculture. His clashes with Liv are another source of some very entertaining dialog.

If you enjoyed Veronica Mars or you're into the whole vampire/zombie thing, check out iZombie. It's on the CW network on Tuesdays at 9pm Eastern. Catch up on past episodes on the CW site, here.

I need to digress for just a minute. Did you know there is actually a book of scholarly essays about the Veronica Mars TV show? Well, there is. It's titled Investigating Veronica Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series (McFarland, 2011). Here's its description:

During the course of its three seasons, Veronica Mars captured the attention of fans and academics alike. The 12 scholarly essays in this collection examine the show's most compelling elements. Topics covered include vintage television, the search for the mother, fatherhood, the show's connection to classical Greek paradigms, the anti-hero's journey, rape narrative and meaning, and television fandom. Collectively, these essays reveal how a teen television show––equal parts noir, romance, social realism and father-daughter drama––became a worthy subject for scholarly study.

I don't feel compelled to read it, but this makes me feel a little less weird about being an AARP-eligible VM fan.

Did you watch the drama Fortitude that I previewed here? Thursday night was the season finale and all I can say is that this was one very weird Nordic police procedural, what with people being turned into murder machines by prehistoric insects crawling back to life out of mammoth corpses that had become exposed because of climate change. The plot is, needless to say, a little on the crazy side, and its strands are complicated (check out this infographic), but it is still compelling to watch, because of the intensity of the acting and its outstanding cast.

The big names, Michael Gambon and Stanley Tucci, are as good as you'd expect, but the lesser-known actors really grab attention, especially Richard Dormer as Sheriff Dan Anderssen. The sheriff is superficially a bit of a brute, but with a whole lot more going on under that surface. If you want to get more information about Fortitude and see some videos, head over here. I was surprised to hear that despite the show's body count, there will be a second season. I'll be watching.

I will confess to you that from 2003-2008, one of my real guilty pleasures in TV watching was Las Vegas, a show set in the fictional Montecito resort and casino, which focused on the Montecito's security and other operational personnel. The cast included James Caan, as head of operations, and his principal security officer, Danny McCoy, played by Josh Duhamel.

Josh Duhamel is back in a new police procedural called Battle Creek. Surprise, it's set in Battle Creek, Michigan. Local police detective Russ Agnew (played by Dean Winters) is a hangdog, rumpled mess and could win awards for cynicism. Agnew is perennially disgruntled by the department's lack of funding and, as he sees it, respect. As the show begins, he feels even more put upon than usual when the FBI sets up across the hall and the impossibly handsome and charismatic Agent Milt Chamberlain (honestly, what is with these character names?), played by Duhamel, is assigned to be the new liaison between the FBI and local law enforcement. In other words, Milt is now Russ's extremely unwanted partner.

The dynamic between the partners is entertaining, and we're still not sure we've been given the real reason why Milt is in Battle Creek, rather than off in some less backwater-ish city and quickly climbing up the ranks. The other cast members are fun to watch too. The great English actress, Janet McTeer, plays Commander Guziewicz, and you'll recognize Kal Penn from the West Wing as Detective White.

The crime-of-the-week plots are decent. They had this Mainer at the second episode, which featured a death-by-maple-syrup murder. The most recent episode did fall into the old the-recognizable-guest-star-dunnit trap (see How to Watch TV Crime Dramas if you want to know my formulas). As soon as my husband and I saw Peter Jacobson, who used to play Dr. Taub on House, we knew he'd be the perp; it was just a question of how and why. Still, it was an entertaining way to spend an hour. If you'd like to give it a try, it's on CBS on Sunday nights at 10pm Eastern. Here's the most important thing: this coming Sunday, the guest star is Candice Bergen––and she's playing a con artist!

By the way, speaking of exceptions to the recognizable-guest-star-dunnit rule, when we watched Bones on Thursday night (yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a lot of TV watching), we spotted Jason Gray-Stanford, who used to play Lt. Randy Disher on Monk. Well, obviously, he was going to be the killer, right? But Bones pulled a fast one and didn't follow convention this time. I have to tell you, though, their killer wasn't believable. They should have followed the formula!  (UPDATE––WITH A SPOILER: A month later, Bones revisited the serial killer case in that episode, and Randy Disher turned out to be the killer after all. The formula wins again!)

Murder in Paradise, Murder at the Top of the World

In the last two weeks, we've had four snowstorms and a total of almost four feet of snow. Excuse me if I find it hard to get too excited about a new murder mystery series set above the Arctic Circle. Still, given the star-studded cast and the big publicity, I had to at least check out Fortitude, a 12-part miniseries that began last week.

The production is a venture between the UK's Sky television and the US's Pivot channel. (What, you never heard of the Pivot channel?) Here's the setup. Fortitude is a settlement of about 700 residents, nearly all of whom work at the Arctic Research Centre or in mining. Michael Gambon plays one of the few exceptions; he's a wildlife photographer who, in one of the drama's first scenes, is walking along an icy shore when, in the distance, he sees a man down and being mauled by a polar bear. He gets a rifle shot off at the bear, but then a lawman shouts at him that it's all under control and he should leave.

That lawman is Sheriff Dan Anderssen, and he quickly finds that the man is a homicide victim, the first ever in Fortitude. Anderssen is none too pleased to find that means the arrival of an outside investigator from London and formerly of the FBI, Eugene Morton, played by Stanley Tucci. Morton's investigation reveals that there is a whole lot more simmering on the woodstove in Fortitude than hot soup.

The local governor, Hildur Odegard (played by Sophie Gråbɵl, who was in the original Danish production of The Killing), has big ambitions for Fortitude. She wants to build one of those ice hotels to draw a lot of tourists. A homicide isn't going to help her plans. Neither will a local boy's sudden illness that might be measles but might be a strain of polio that he brought with him when his family moved to Fortitude from Afghanistan. To add to her headaches, somebody has discovered what look like wooly mammoth bones, which biologist Stoddart (played by a former Doctor Who, Christopher Eccleston) would use to put the kibosh on the hotel.

I've only watched the first episode of Fortitude, but I thought I should let you all know about it so you can check it out for yourself. Nordic noir, which mystery mavens have been familiar with for several years now, has started to gain strength in the TV medium. If you enjoyed The Killing or other moody crime dramas, give this one a try. It's got that gloomy, claustrophobic foreboding that is so familiar in Nordic noir. But fair warning; you have to pay very close attention. It's not clear at the outset what is going on a lot of the time and the mix of the characters' accents often makes it hard to follow the dialog.

Checking out the series at all can be a bit of a challenge. In the UK, it's on Sky Atlantic on Thursday nights at 9pm. If you're in the US, do you have the Pivot channel? If you have DirecTV, it's included in most packages on channel 267, and the show is on Thursdays at 10pm (Eastern). Some satellite and cable systems that don't carry the Pivot channel nevertheless carry Fortitude as an on-demand program, so take a look at that possibility. The Pivot channel website is streaming the series here as well. Finally, if you want to educate yourself about the series, visit its website here.

If I can't be on a nice warm beach this winter (like my brother-in-law and his spouse, who are in Maui right now, not that I resent them at all), then watching Death in Paradise allows me to enjoy the sun, sand, sparkling sea, tropical breezes––and murder––vicariously. This UK production, filmed on Guadeloupe, is set on the fictional island of Sainte Marie.

The series began in 2011 on the BBC, and is now in Season Four. In the US, you can likely find it on your local PBS station, most of which are currently showing Season Two. If you go to the pbs.org website, you can watch streaming video back to the beginning of the series.

The series begin with the arrival of Detective Inspector Richard Poole of Scotland Yard to Sainte Marie. Poole is disgruntled to find himself sent to Sainte Marie to solve the murder of a police officer, and then horrified when he is pressured to assume the dead man's position on the force. Poole is hostile to sun and heat and he can't stand the relaxed pace. (Kind of like my cousin Lisa from Boston, who gets very irritated when the staff at my local Dunkin' Donuts tries to make small talk rather than produce her coffee instantly and with zero chit-chat.) Poole stomps around Sainte Marie wearing a suit and tie, seeming to hope that if he continues to dress as a Londoner he'll return to London very soon. No such luck.

As Poole reluctantly settles in, he gets to know the local force. Commissioner Patterson is intensely grouchy, but officers Fidel and Dwayne are unfamiliar with the concept of intensity. That's not the case with the gorgeous––but sharp tongued––Camille Bordey. Camille is the only female on the police force, but anybody who tries to take advantage of her beauty or gender is likely to get sliced up by that tongue. She's none too patient with this stuffy English interloper, but they develop a prickly, yet effective, partnership.

The cases that Poole, Camille and the force tackle are sometimes very island-oriented, such as voodoo, a scuba diving death, and drug running by yacht. Others, though, could be crimes committed anywhere; the viewers just get the added treat of the tropical scenery.

I won't claim that Death in Paradise is high art or that the production values are elevated. No, this is standard BBC murder mystery fare––but worth watching because of the appeal of the characters and the attractiveness of the setting.

Just a quick final mention. If you prefer your crime stories to be set somewhere between the extremes of the Arctic Circle and Sainte Marie, the third season of The Americans just began on FX. This thrilling and stylish story of deep undercover KGB spies working in Washington DC in the 1980s, which I wrote about here two years ago, is entering a fascinating new phase as the protagonists' two kids become interesting to the Soviets as possible second-generation agents. The success of The Americans has apparently inspired a new show on NBC called Allegiance, which began last night. I'll be sticking with FX.