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!

Ah, Not-So-Sweet Mystery of Life

If you're reading this, we don't have to tell you that the mystery genre has been a hit from the beginning and seems to gain in popularity all the time. There's a lot of theorizing out there about why mysteries are so popular. Most of the theories are pretty high-falutin' stuff. The real reason might be simpler; like that book mysteries are so much better than the many other mysteries we have to deal with every day.

Georgette Spelvin: I'll go along with this reasoning, because the last time I tried to invoke Freud and Jung to explain why mystery reading is so addicting, you asked me what I'd been smoking, Sister.

Sister Mary Murderous: In real life, men are mysterious to women and women are mysterious to men. But on a day-to-day basis, the man/woman mysteries can be pretty pedestrian. Like: Why can't my husband find anything in the refrigerator or figure out where half the stuff goes when we unload the dishwasher? To be fair, I should talk about the things he finds inexplicable about me. But, hey, it's my blog and who says I have to be fair?

Georgette Spelvin: Not I. Life isn't fair. Just read any book of crime fiction to discover an innocent decision that leads to Big Trouble. Simply renting a place to live is disastrous in Ruth Rendell's A Demon in My View and Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase. The decision to eat a chocolate brings death in Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case. I guess you could call this a sweet mystery of death.

Maltese Condor: Ah, sweet mystery of life! I believe, according to Bing Crosby in the song of the same name, the main mystery is falling in love. Carl Sandburg, who wrote, in his poem, Explanations of Love, "There is a pair of shoes love wears and the coming is a mystery" would agree with Bing. Your mysteries are more tangible, Sister.

Sister Mary Murderous: If you're a parent, you know all about cracking alibis, following a trail and ultimately solving the crime. But, let's face it, the kids aren't exactly criminal masterminds, so breaking their alibis doesn't take a super-sleuth. Following a trail isn't too tough either, since it's usually made up of mucky footmarks and sticky fingerprints. The only real challenge is subjecting the convicted culprit to a punishment that (a) is inventive, (b) is effective, and (c) isn't so inventive and effective that child protective services gets involved.

Maltese Condor: Peter Robinson's Close To Home tells the story of the deaths of two 15-year-old boys, decades apart. The cases would have been much easier to solve if the water hadn't been muddied by the fact that at least in one case, other boys––rascals and scamps, the bunch of them––hadn't felt that there were some things they couldn't tell their parents, such as playing hooky and problems with dirty old men. One of the scamps, Alan Banks, learned the value of the truth in his later years as a CID Inspector. Frankly, some parents tend to down-pedal much of what of their offspring tell them about their activities.

Georgette Spelvin: Yes, some parents are guilty of doing that. Then there are some parents who usher their kids into criminal behavior. We all remember Mario Puzo's The Godfather. Maybe you haven't read the hilarious "coming-of-legal-incarceration-age" story narrated by Luke Fulmer in Dallas Hudgens's Drive Like Hell, in which the 10-year-old Luke meets his dad Lyndell for the first time when he shows up in Luke's bedroom in the middle of the night. A few hours later, Luke is crawling through the doggie door of an auto supplies store to steal a distributor cap and an oil filter at Lyndell's request and driving the car while Lyndell rides shotgun "with a Kool snagged in his teeth and a pint of Motlow between his legs." I wasn't raised in the South by redneck parents like Luke, but I felt I was tagging along with Luke while I read this fabulous book.

Della Streetwise: Here's another guy who was born to bend the law. Nick Harkaway's Joe Spork is the son of a London gangster and holds down a job as an antique clocks restorer. While working on a decades-old mechanism for an old intelligence agent, he activates a doomsday device from the Cold War days. This sets off a race to nab it by individuals and organizations of all stripes. Joe decides not to cower behind the aspidistra. It's no mystery that Harkaway is John le Carré's son. His brand-new book, Angelmaker, is an exhilarating and funny chase between many spies and I loved it.

Currently I'm reading Fannie Flagg's Standing in the Rainbow. Thanks for the intro to this author, Sister MM. How I got along without reading her is a mystery to me.

Georgette Spelvin: Right now, I'm accompanying Minnesota Det. Sarah Pribek as she searches for her missing husband in Jodi Compton's terrific The 37th Hour.

Sister Mary Murderous: While your book sleuth is out and about, interviewing witnesses and suspects, we're at home, pursuing our own mysteries. Instead of a missing-persons case, we're tracking down the ever-elusive socks that disappear from the laundry. For those of us over 40, we're in hot pursuit of our reading glasses. (Hint: Try the top of your head.)

Maltese Condor: I am reminded of the series about the Peculiar Crimes Unit, featuring aging detectives John May and Arthur Bryant, who won't hang up their hats. They can find solutions to the most complex puzzling crimes, but one of them (I can't remember which!) can't ever find his glasses.

As far as I know, the mystery of the lost socks has been solved. Jerry Seinfeld has revealed that these are not losses but, rather, well-coordinated escapes, planned while in the paired state. Many a sock marriage has gone down the tubes and I won't go into incompatibility, because that is a sock of a different stripe.

Georgette Spelvin: My family members could mystify competitively. I mean, how can a kid's usual good sense develop the hiccups, allowing initials to be carved into the door of a brand-new car, or a twig to be employed as a pick-lock to completely jam a locked front door? But it's inanimate objects that really make me shake my head. How is it that inanimate objects sniff out occasions when you're vulnerable? Like:

• The spilled glass of milk that lands, not on the floor, but on the back of your dog, so he can run madly all over the house, shaking himself and rolling on the carpet;
• The paper cup of coffee that explodes all over your shirt-front as you're getting up to speak to a room full of people; and
• The house door that locks itself at 6:00 a.m., when you're outside in the dark, dragging the garbage can to the curb, dressed in your rattiest pajamas and your husband's hiking boots––and, of course, not carrying keys or a cellphone.

Sister Mary Murderous: On the home front, we use forensic investigation techniques, but they involve things like trying to figure out what's in that Tupperware bowl under the green fuzz, whether that smell means the leftover Chinese food is no good anymore or if that shirt can be worn again before it's laundered.

Periphera: What is that disturbing sticky crud that forms on the bottom of dining tables? Lunching at a restaurant, I accidentally brushed the underside of a very clean-looking table and immediately had to go wash my hands. Came home and crawled around wiping furniture from the underside.

Sister Mary Murderous: And then there are puzzle mysteries. I love puzzle mysteries. The book has maps, a limited universe of suspects, timetables, alibis, witness statements and the like, and if you put your mind to it, you can actually figure whodunnit, how, where and when. But in real life, you just get to solve the puzzle of how you can get to work, run your errands, make your meetings and appointments and other obligations on time and still maybe have some time for yourself at the end of the day.

Maltese Condor: Parnell Hall has a bunch of mysteries relating to actual puzzles. He's also well-known for his YouTube musical diatribe about the mysteries of the publishing world.

Crosswords are supposed to make you smarter and ward off Alzheimer's disease, but sudoku puzzles just make me feel like an idiot who still has problems with the numbers one to nine.

Sister Mary Murderous: Another problem with the mysteries of life is that unlike books, there is no solution. There is no point even pursuing questions like:*

• Why does my spouse think we have to clean the house before the cleaners get here?
• Why am I always having to tell Joe in Accounting, "My eyes are up here, Joe"?
• How come my appliance/vehicle falls apart just after the warranty runs out?
• Speaking of cars, you know the trouble signals that show you pictograms intended to alert you that your washer fluid is low, your headlight is out, you need oil, or whatever? Why do they look nothing like what they're supposed to be signaling? They all look like they're trying to warn of an alien invasion or an oil rig explosion.
• How is it possible that I have 500 TV channels but nothing to watch?
• Am I turning into my mother?



Dick Vitale

• When we have company, how does the cat immediately choose the one cat-hater in the crowd to get all friendly with?
• At golf tournaments, why are there so many idiots who scream "Get in the hole!" as soon as the golfer's club hits the ball––even when the guy is teeing off a 600-yard par-5 hole?
• Does anybody think Dick Vitale is a good, interesting or even bearable sports announcer? 
• The Kardashians. Why? And here's a sports/reality TV crossover mystery: What the heck is up with Bruce Jenner's face?

* Not that any of these questions are ones I've ever pondered personally!

Maltese Condor: I can sympathize with anyone who wants to clean up before the cleaners come in, because they might have house cleaner like sharp-eyed Lily Bard, from Charlaine Harris's series in the not-so-sleepy little town of Shakespeare, Arkansas. 

Or how about sharp-tongued Blanche White, from Barbara Neely's excellent series about a middle-aged domestic worker? Blanche is a women who's had bad times and, in Blanche On the Lam, we find her under suspicion for murder. Fortunately, she's in a great position to ferret out the clues she needs to find the true culprit.

Georgette Spelvin: MC, your talk about being in a great position for ferreting out clues reminds me of Ray Milland in The Big Clock, a noir movie based on the 1946 book by Kenneth Fearing. Or how about James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window? In that movie, Stewart is confined to a wheelchair, and he's in a uniquely good position for spying on his neighbors. The first time I saw it, it scared the daylights out of me because Raymond Burr is so darned creepy. Watching it still makes getting to sleep later a mysterious process.

Sister, we're making a rule that there's to be no more mention of the Kardashians on Read Me Deadly Ever Again.

The Material Witnesses: Got any imponderable mysteries of life to lay on us?