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!)

Crime on Your TV

I've been in a little bit of a mystery reading drought for a few weeks. Instead, I'm on a nonfiction binge. But I have been watching some crime/espionage on TV. Here's my take.


Two Lives

Libby Fischer Hellmann, whose latest novel is Nobody's Child, recommended I see the movie Two Lives, which was on Netflix. And she was right; I can't stop thinking about it.

A little background first. You all know that just one element of Nazi lunacy was their conviction that "Aryans" were superior and that the key to Germany's future was to make a lot more of them. (And have a whole lot fewer of non-Aryans, but that's another story.) Germans were exhorted to have loads of children, and not being married was not a big deal.

The SS founded the Lebensborn movement in Germany and some of its conquered countries, and encouraged women to have racially pure (as they saw it) children in Lebensborn hospitals. The babies would then usually go to a Lebensborn facility and be adopted by selected families, often SS families, in Germany.

There were more Lebensborn children born in Norway than any other country, including Germany. Many of these children were born as a result of romances between Norwegian women and occupying German soldiers. Women in Norway who agreed to allow their children to be adopted didn't realize that they would be sent to Germany.

After World War II, the Norwegian government tried to repatriate the children to Norway, but they weren't entirely successful. This was also a hugely complicated matter, because in the aftermath of the war, women who had had relationships with German soldiers were scorned; thousands were actually arrested as collaborators and often physically attacked. Their children were also frequently mistreated by neighbors and in school.

Two Lives is set mostly in Bergen, Norway, in 1990. Katrine Myrdal lives on the coast in a four-generation house. Katrine's daughter, Anne, is a law student with a baby, and Katrine's mother, Åsa Evensen, has come to live in the house temporarily to help out with the baby. The only man in the house is Bjarte Myrdal, Katrine's husband. Judging from his work attire of a blue double-breasted uniform with loads of gold braid, he's a high-ranking officer in Norway's navy.

It looks like a good life in Bergen. The family is loving, Katrine has an interesting-looking creative job, and she spends some time early every morning sea kayaking in the bay. Into this idyll comes a crusading young lawyer, Sven Solbach. Sven has come to talk to Katrine and Åsa, because Åsa's love affair during the war with a German soldier resulted in Katrine, who was sent to Germany soon after her birth.

Sven wants Åsa and Katrine to be his splashiest clients in a human-rights lawsuit complaining of the treatment of war children and their mothers. He thinks the time is right because, in this year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lebensborn facility records from East Germany are now coming available. And Åsa and Katrine have a particularly compelling story, because Katrine was reunited with her mother as a young woman, years after the war's end. She managed to escape East Germany by stealing a rowboat and pushing off from the coast in bad weather. Only after passing out from hypothermia and exhaustion was she rescued by Danish fishermen.

Katrine just wants Sven to go away, but Anne is interested. As a law student, she finds it an interesting case, and of course it's a fascinating part of her family history. Sven's a good-looking guy, too, which doesn't hurt. In quick flashbacks, we learn that there is a mystery about Kristine; something that she doesn't want anyone, including her family, to know about. As the flashbacks go on, we learn just what that is and the film becomes a tense thriller.

I can't say much more without being spoiler-y. I'll just say that the end titles to the film reveal some shocking historical facts behind this compelling story.

I can't stop thinking about the film, not just because it's a gripping thriller, but because the crisis for Katrine and her family is such a human one, even though it's based on a sensational history. Juliane Köhler, who plays Katrine, is tremendously talented, but the real scene stealer is Liv Ullmann, as her mother, Åsa. Nobody can do so much without a word, and Ullmann's face in her entirely silent final scene will break your heart more thoroughly than the most eloquent words ever could.


The Mysteries of Laura

Last month, we had an old friend visiting, and one evening we decided to try out the first episode of the new series, The Mysteries of Laura, starring Deborah Messing, of Will and Grace fame. The first episode was more or less of a disaster.

The writers went way over the top to make sure we understood that this Laura character isn't anything like any of the characters Messing has played in the past. Laura is an NYPD homicide detective, the best in her precinct. And a good thing, too, because she's out of control in every other way. She's a complete slob (says I, as I sit here in my ancient, fraying track pants, dabbing at the coffee I just dribbled down my front), shoots the ear off a bad guy holding a knife to a bystander when she's too impatient to wait for the hostage negotiators, and she uses police resources to help her find a school and caretakers for her out-of-control twin boys.

When I glanced over at my husband and the friend, they were shaking their heads and looked like they were itching to grab the remote. But I've continued watching, because I kind of like (relate to?) the Laura character and the other cast members, the show can be comical, there are some very interesting NYC location shots, and I'm pretty much of a sucker for police dramas.

The subsequent episodes have been less cartoonish than the first, and the whodunnits fairly interesting, with one major caveat. Each of the first three episodes falls right into one of my TV crime drama whodunnit convention traps, which I described in my "How to Watch TV Crime Dramas" post back in February of 2013. The writers really need to make it just a teensy bit harder for the viewer to figure out whodunnit. If they do, the show may turn out to be a keeper.


How to Get Away with Murder

I know viewers often have to suspend their disbelief when watching TV, and I'm usually able to do that if I like the cast or if a show has an entertaining comedic or dramatic energy. But there is a limit, and ABC's new How to Get Away with Murder sprinted way past my limit in its first episode.

The series is set at the very definitely fictional top-tier Middleton Law School. Shiny new first-year law students pack the auditorium for that classic entry-level course, Criminal Law. In strides their professor, the leather-clad, cold-eyed and tough-talking Annalise Keating, played by Oscar winner Viola Davis.

The prof tells the students that they won't be learning theories, case-law principles, analysis or any of that kind of thing. (You know, the stuff they actually do teach in top-tier law schools). No, instead they'll be learning how to get away with murder, the way it's done in a real criminal law practice––like the one she operates in her spare time from teaching. Apparently, the good professor isn't bothered with the need to publish, like most law professors.

Professor Keating also tells her students that they will be competing to help her with actual cases and that the four best competitors will get the chance to work with her in her firm. Excuse me, but didn't I see that plot line in Legally Blonde? It wasn't a problem there, since that was a comedy, but please don't ask me to swallow it in a drama.

Anyway, off we go with law students ruthlessly stomping all over each other in their mad scramble to get this job. Go ahead, skip your other classes (with Professor Keating's encouragement, which I'm sure her colleagues appreciate), use unethical and downright illegal methods to come up with help for her trial. That will be excellent practice for a month from now, when flash-forwards tell us that four of the best and the brightest in the class will have to figure out just how they themselves can get away with a real murder. Oy.

Show creator Shonda Rhimes is legendary for her shows' (Grey's Anatomy and Scandal) gleeful disregard of reality and proportion––but seriously? It's true that a show about the real law school experience would have about as much action as Slow TV, a reality-show phenomenon that made news with a program depicting a seven-hour train trip from a driver's-seat camera, but How to Get Away with Murder goes too far, too fast in the other direction.


Gracepoint

Just as I expected, Fox Television's remake of the BBC's Broadchurch is lacking in just about everything that made its inspiration work so well. First of all, I don't see the point in even making a show whose every scene and line of dialog is virtually identical to another show. But if the remake is more of a copy made on a low-on-toner printer, it's a complete puzzle.

I can't say it any better than this, from Willa Paskin's review in Slate:

Despite imitating the British original in almost every particular, something has been lost in the U.K.-to-U.S. translation. Through seven episodes there is nothing wildly different about the two shows, but Gracepoint has a facsimile's faded quality. Something about it is less sharp, less bright, less keen, and you are left with a washed-out flier you have seen before.

There has been a slight sanding down of nearly every aspect of the original in this American version. Carver and Ellie's personalities, for example, have both been softened. In Broadchurch, Ellie was played by Olivia Colman in a much feistier, funnier, and warmer register than Anna Gunn's interpretation of the character. Gunn's Ellie is upset to have lost a job to Carver, but not that upset. Perhaps that's because Carver (called D.I. Hardy in Broadchurch) is less persnickety: He's still blunt, but he's not quite as socially maladroit. And without the same tension between the two, Gracepoint also lacks some necessary humor––as well as their dueling perspectives on humanity.

When reviewing Broadchurch, I said that I found the show, despite its focus on a child's murder, "spiritually salubrious." I was impressed with the way the secrets uncovered by the detectives, unsettling as some could be, were knotty and specific. The residents of its cozy small town might not be what they seemed, but they weren't all malevolent or vicious––often, they, too, were coping with grief. But somehow this sense of balance––that it is not just evil that lurks in your neighbor's heart, but sadness, resilience, and love, too––is missing from Gracepoint, which really does feel like yet another series about the awfulness lurking beneath the surface of seemingly placid towns.

That's enough about TV crime dramas for now. I'll come back another time to talk about some of the others I've been watching––in between football games.

It's a Crime These Shows Were Cancelled

Awhile back, my husband and I were grousing about NBC's having cancelled our favorite new sitcom, Go On, which led to a discussion of the last time we were this irritated with NBC. That was when they cancelled, after two seasons, the wonderful series, Life.

Life ran from 2007-2009, and it starred Damian Lewis as LAPD Detective Charlie Crews. If you're one of the fans of Homeland, you'll recognize Damian Lewis as Nicholas Brody on that show. He also played Soames on the second miniseries of The Forsyte Saga and was in Band of Brothers.

The back story on Life is that Charlie Crews spent 12 years in maximum security at California's Pelican Bay facility, after being falsely convicted of murdering a good friend and the friend's family. When, finally, his conviction is overturned, he wins a bundle in his lawsuit and reinstatement to the LAPD. Reinstatement is important to him, because being back on the job will be his route to finding out who killed his friend and family, who framed him and why.

Nobody ever wants to have to rehire a fired employee, no matter how improper the firing was. Rehiring Crews is intensely uncomfortable for the LAPD, obviously because it's a reminder of a case of institutional failure, but also because the new Crews is just so odd. He discovered Zen in prison and Charlie Crews, Zen Cop, is a pretty alien creature to his colleagues, especially his new partner, the petite, tough-as-nails Dani Reese, played by Sarah Shahi.

At first, you think Charlie is awfully mellow for a guy who's wrongfully spent 12 years in maximum security and who's lost his wife (who divorced him, married a yuppie and now has two kids). But mellow isn't the right word. For the new Charlie, it's normal to be emotionally naked. That has its good and bad sides. It's not good when he uses his police lights and siren to pull over his ex-wife and her new husband to talk to them about, well, everything.

On the other hand, Charlie has a passion for fruit, which he was never once served in prison, and he thinks everything in nature is a wonder. I was going to say that expressing those emotions of pleasure and wonder is the good side of Charlie's emotional nakedness, but when he always says exactly what enters his mind––like about kiwi fruit, say, when he's in the middle of an arrest––it can be awkward.

Dani's exasperation with her seemingly hippie-dippy partner turns gradually to respect and a sort of protectiveness, though, as she sees his detective instincts are still sharp while, at the same time, his new Zen attitude makes him brilliantly able to connect to witnesses and suspects and gain valuable information.

You can watch streaming episodes of Life here or on Netflix Watch Instantly. Please just try the first episode. I'm betting you'll be hooked.

You know, I really should have been ready for NBC's cancellation of Life, considering my previous experience with their treatment of the fabulously original crime drama Boomtown. I'll be the first to admit I didn't watch the show when it first started in the fall of 2002. But a few weeks after it began, my favorite cousin was visiting when they ran a marathon of the first six episodes, and we sat down to watch one. Six hours later . . .

What a show. Set in Los Angeles, it starred Donnie Wahlberg and Mykelti Williamson as LAPD police detectives, Jason Gedrick* and Gary Basaraba as LAPD officers, and Neal McDonough as LA County Assistant District Attorney. The feature that made the show so engrossing was that each episode shows an investigation from the points of view of the different characters, and not just the police detectives and officers and the ADA, but also reporters, EMTs, suspects, witnesses, crime victims and lawyers.

If you need your storytelling to be linear, you'll either dislike this show or it'll knock you right off that straight-line compulsion. In this show, you come at an incident from several different angles; you experience it at the beginning of the episode and come back to it later, with the benefit of other things you see in between. You learn more about what's going on with one character, and that adds a layer of meaning. Then another character and another layer, and so on.

Boomtown is not a whodunnit or even, really, a police procedural. In some episodes, the crime, the victim and the perpetrator are shown right from the get-go. This is a character-driven drama about real people whose work brings them into contact every day with violence and danger, how that stays with them after the workday is done and, in turn, how what happens after work affects them on the job. The show has a style and vision far more artistic than most anything you'll see on TV, but all the show's style points aside, it's the characters that keep you watching.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a streaming option for Boomtown. You can buy the DVDs for the first season, but it looks like the second season is no longer available. That may be just as well, since in the second season, NBC stripped away much of what made the series so compelling. Somehow, they thought (and not for the first time) that if they just take an original show and make it look like a thousand other shows, that would be the ticket to success.

After the Boomtown and Life experiences, I didn't have expectations of a long life for ABC's cop dramedy The Unusuals. A good thing, too, since it lasted only 10 episodes.

I won't claim The Unusuals was up to the standard of Boomtown or Life, but it was different and entertaining. Set in New York City, the premise is that Detective Casey Shraeger, played by Amber Tamblyn, is transferred from Vice to Second Precinct Homicide, where she gets a real coming of age.

The precinct's Homicide squad is a collection of misfits. That's made clear to Casey on her first day:

Detective Allison Beaumont: Here's what you need to know about the Second: Alvarez talks about himself in the third person, Banks sleeps in a bulletproof vest, and yesterday Delahoy named his mustache.  

Detective Casey Shraeger: What about Walsh?

Beaumont: On the plus side, he doesn't stare at your boobs when he's talking to you. 

Shraeger: The down side?

Beaumont: I've got great boobs. Why isn't he looking?

Definitely, the most nearly normal person is Casey's partner, Jason Walsh, played by Jeremy Renner. Walsh may not have any serious quirks, but he is obsessed with finding out who murdered his previous partner––a partner who was known to be corrupt.

The other detectives include Adam Goldberg as Eric Delahoy, a deeply pessimistic man who refuses to tell anybody that he's been diagnosed with a brain tumor and also keeps dodging the medical professionals who think he should, y'know, do something about it. Delahoy's partner is Leo Banks, the guy who lives in a bulletproof vest, which turns out to be because he's sure he will die this year, at age 42, the same age his father and grandfather died.

Each episode tells an interesting crime story, and the various guest stars and side characters are just as good as the leads. While much of the series was comic, it tackled serious subjects and had moments of real pathos.

For comedy, my favorite aspect of the show was the disembodied voice of Dispatch, whose acerbic remarks formed the soundtrack to every scene in a squad car. Dispatch's world-weary smoker's voice reminded me a little bit of old-time character actress Selma Diamond. The real voice belongs to an actress named Marisa Vural. Dispatch would advice squads to be on the lookout for suspects, like the man dressed in a hot dog costume who "may or may not" be wielding a samurai sword, or the Puerto Rican man wearing a cape and no pants, or she might remind everyone that it's a full moon, or share way too much information about last night's disastrous date.

Looking at the bright side, at least the cancellation of The Unusuals made Jeremy Renner available to capitalize on his Oscar and SAG nominations for Best Actor in the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker. The Unusuals is available on streaming video and inexpensive DVD.

Now that we're entering the dog days of summer, and there's not much of anything on TV, this is a good time for you to watch these gems––and for me to re-watch them. If you didn't see them the first time around, please give them a try now.

* Poor Jason Gedrick probably swore off being in a quality cop drama ever again after this. He'd also been one of the stars of EZ Streets, a brilliant, dark cop show that aired for less than one full season on CBS in 1996-1997. That show, also starring Ken Olin (Thirtysomething) and Joe Pantoliano (The Sopranos), and directed by Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) was set in a dark, decaying city in the upper Midwest and every episode was like a movie. There is a DVD, but it only includes three of the nine episodes. It's a crime!

How to Watch TV Crime Dramas

I used to tease my mother and aunt about watching Murder She Wrote, Matlock and Diagnosis Murder, because they were so formulaic. Then, one day, while my husband and I were watching Castle, or Rizzoli and Isles, maybe it was The Mentalist, it hit me: today's crime dramas aren't much different. Holy Jessica Fletcher; these shows are just Murder She Wrote for baby boomers!

Well, if today's crime dramas are formulaic, at least you can learn the formulas and amaze your friends by predicting what will happen next on the show. You could maybe even win a few bets. There are just a few rules, guidelines and conventions that go into today's formula, and I am willing to reveal them to you––as long as you don't come watch TV at my house.

Let's start with the most important thing: the whodunnit. When I say that today's crime dramas are just as formulaic as they ever were, I mean you can solve for X (the murderer) with a few simple rules. Heck, these rules are so simple you can even flowchart them if you are so inclined.

First of all, you need to understand that scripted TV cop/detective dramas are generally divided into three acts. The detectives usually have somebody they're focusing on in Act One, and another chief suspect in Act Two. Neither of these suspects will be the murderer. To be fair, I should say that there is a very occasional plot twist in which the Act One suspect––who will have been cleared of suspicion either during Act Two or by the end of Act One––will suddenly be revealed as the murderer in Act Three. This is like the Statue of Liberty play in football, though; meaning that this plot twist is only effective if used extremely rarely and judiciously.

The Prisoner's Patrick McGoohan played the killer four times on Columbo

Let's move on to the next whodunnit rule––and this one's a firm one. If there is a well-known actor guest-starring in this episode, and s/he doesn't seem to have all that much face time in the episode, that means that s/he will turn out to be the murderer in Act Three.

Next whodunnit rule: If one of the suspects is a super-rich captain of industry, that's your man––unless it's one of his kids or close associates. Assuming that there is no zillionaire character and there isn't a well-known guest star in the episode––or if there is but the guest star seems to have a lot of face time––then the general rule is that the murderer will turn out to be a character who is introduced in Act One but who is not a suspect. For example, this will usually be a witness interviewed by the detectives; somebody like a friend, co-worker or schoolmate of the victim, a relative of the victim's spouse. If you're watching a show, pay attention to these witness characters and amaze your friends by predicting the whodunnit before the end of Act One.

Reed Diamond

Fred Koehler

One over-arching rule is that certain guest stars will be the murderer 99-44/100ths percent of the time. Two examples are Reed Diamond and Fred Koehler. Memorize those faces. If one of those guys is on the show, it's a virtual lock that he's the killer. Just think how impressed your friends will be when you nail the killer as soon as Reed or Fred's face appears on the screen. Don't say Reed or Fred is always the killer, though. Make up some story about your prediction that makes you sound more clever than that. By the way, there aren't many female actors in the Reed/Fred category, but Elaine Hendrix comes pretty close.

Elaine Hendrix

This next one's a whydunnit, but it can help you narrow down the whodunnit. If a pharmaceutical company is part of the plot, the reason for the murder will turn out to be that the victim found out that a drug about to be marketed has deadly side effects and certain people in the company have been covering it up. On a related theme, you can generally assume that if any mega-corp is part of the plot, at least one of its executives or directors will be evil and will be the force behind the murder.

Now that we've covered the basics of the whodunnit, we can talk about a few other conventions of crime drama. These don't lend themselves quite so well to impressing your friends, but you can still use them to make wise-guy remarks––and that's always a vital part of the TV-watching experience.

The first convention is the TV version of the Bond Girl rules, meaning that if one of the show's leads falls for a guest star, the guest star will be killed or victimized in some way. An exception to this convention is when the guest star turns out to be the murderer. To decide which it will be before Act Three, refer to the guest star whodunnit rule above.

Our next convention concerns crime-detection technology. The police on TV have some amazing technology. Computerized whiteboards, huge touch screens with multiple displays that allow them to graphically represent all of the elements of the case, mind-boggling medical forensics tools and, my favorite, facial recognition software that instantly provides the ID of somebody caught on some grainy surveillance camera from a database of, apparently, everybody in the entire country. Half the technology on these shows doesn't even exist in real life, let alone in cash-strapped cop shops. The only vaguely realistic part of the whole cop/technology thing is that federal crime agencies seem to have much fancier technology than city police detectives.

Let's move outside. Out on the street, when the plainclothes detectives come upon a suspect, they always call out to him when they're far enough away that the suspect can run. This convention has been around since the start of TV crime drama. The idea seems to be that the show needs a little goosing up of the action, which is provided by alerting the suspect, so he and the cops can rush down streets and alleys, knocking down innocent civilians, vaulting over obstacles, crashing into vendor carts, climbing fences and so on, until finally reaching a dead end. (At which point we can go to commercial.)

How about a social convention? If organized crime is part of the plot, writers now seem to shy away from making the gangsters Italian or from any other ethnic group except the Russians and Irish. Yes, according to contemporary TV, pretty much all organized crime in contemporary American is run by those two groups.

It almost goes without saying that on TV crime drama, all criminal defense lawyers are jerks who treat cops with utter contempt. I don't even know why I bothered writing about this convention, since everybody already knows this one.

In modern TV crime drama, the protagonists are now required to have a dark back story. When the writers want to take a break from their flowcharts and prove that they have some serious dramatic chops, it's time for an episode that revisits the back story. This is why viewers occasionally have to suffer through the recurrent melodramatic story lines featuring the Red John story on The Mentalist or Beckett's mother's murder on Castle, for example.

You might ask why I watch TV crime dramas if I think they're so formulaic. It's like what William Hurt's coked-up character in The Big Chill says when he's watching old black-and-white B gangster movies in the middle of the night: "Sometimes you just have to let art flow over you."