The Fall Crop of Crime Shows

A few weeks into the Fall 2007 TV season, a member of my crime TV and film discussion list, CrimeSeen, lamented the state of crime shows on broadcast television, yearning for the days of Mannix, Rockford, and Murder, She Wrote . Now some months into the season, we have a better idea of each new show's staying power. Here are my opinions of the good, the bad, and the ugly:

MONDAY

Chuck (NBC, 8:00 PM) is an action comedy created by Josh Schwartz ( The O.C. ) about electronics store techie (Zachary Levi) whose brain is bombarded with thousands of state secrets when an old rival, now a rogue spy, sends him an e-mail. Separately tasked with recovering said secrets are Maj. John Casey of the NSA (Adam Baldwin) and Sarah Walker of the CIA (Yvonne Strahovski). It's nicely unclear which agency has the better motive. Nerdy Chuck Bartowski has developed believable boy-meets-girl chemistry with his sexy CIA handler, but the show works best when Chuck's spy adventures spill into his day job, forcing him to juggle. He shouldn't appear to have a lot of downtime to play James Bond.

K-Ville (FOX, 9:00 PM) is a cop drama set in post-Katrina New Orleans, starring Anthony Anderson and Cole (son of Wings) Hauser. The premiere was fine. Good action, good atmosphere, but the backstory of Hauser's character, Trevor Cobb, ruins it for me. By the end of the premiere, we learn he was a convict who took the chance to reinvent himself when Katrina hit, first joining the Army, then the NOPD. Would not happen in real life.

Journeyman (NBC, 10:00 PM) stars Scottish actor Kevin McKidd as San Francisco reporter Dan Vassar, who begins to black out and trip through time without warning. I found the premiere not different enough from previous turn-back-time dramas Quantum Leap , Early Edition , and Tru Calling and have not followed the show.

TUESDAY

Reaper (CW, 9:00 PM) is about 21-year-old slacker Sam Oliver (Bret Harrison) who learns his parents sold his soul to The Devil (Ray Wise) before he was born. The Devil puts him to work sending escaped souls back to hell. Though its premise is similar to the canceled FOX series Brimstone , as a comedy, Reaper is very different in tone. Like Chuck Bartowski, Sam has to juggle demonic bounty hunter duties with his job at a home improvement store and his crush on a co-worker. The series asks the interesting question, how much of Sam's life is predetermined? Does he have any power to change his fate? I, for one, am pulling for him.

WEDNESDAY

Pushing Daisies (ABC, 8:00 PM) is outrightly the most surreal new fall series. Billed as a "forensic fairy tale" (complete with narrator), it's the story of Ned (Lee Pace), who discovers his touch has the power to revive the dead. He uses this power to make pies with forever-ripe fruit filling. Unfortunately, the power works a bit differently on people. If he touches someone he's revived, that person goes back to being dead for good. If he revives a dead person for more than one minute, a random person dies in exchange. This scenario sounds fair enough to shifty P.I. Emerson Cod (Chi McBride), who has Ned revive murder victims so they can reveal who killed them and Cod can get the glory. Things become more complicated when Ned revives his murdered first love, Charlotte Charles (Anna Friel). He can't bring himself to let her die again, which means he can never touch her again. This complicated premise worked to heighten romance in the premiere. I've found subsequent episodes too cute and unreal for my taste.

Bionic Woman (NBC, 9:00 PM) is an update bearing little resemblance to the original 1976 show beyond the protag's name. The new Jaime Sommers (Michelle Ryan) is a college dropout bartender rashly fitted with bionics by her surgeon boyfriend after their near-fatal car accident. The organization behind Jaime's bionics is rather shady, and soon she's pursued by psychopathic previous model Sarah Corvis (Katee Sackhoff). As with most superhero shows, as human as Jaime and Sarah seem, there will always something otherworldly about them that will have to be served, and that ultimately turns me off. The show's ratings have dipped each week since its premiere.

Life (NBC, 10:00 PM) stars British actor Damian Lewis as Charlie Crews, a cop whose wrongful conviction is overturned twelve years into a life sentence. Many of his former colleagues hate him, either because they still suspect him or because he sued for reinstatement. Relying on the Zen he studied in prison, Crews must catch up on twelve years of the American culture while solving crimes including who originally framed him. Despite a moderately far-fetched premise, Life is one of the straighter cop shows to come along in recent years. Crews's Zen attitude and chemistry with his new partner are unfolding nicely. I hope this one stays around.

FRIDAY

Moonlight (CBS, 9:00 PM) tops Journeyman as the least original series of the fall. Following the cases of Los Angeles P.I./vampire Mick St. John (Alex O'Loughlin), everything about this show feels as if it's been done before, from the voiceover, to the mortal love interest, to the attempts to keep a secret identity.

Women's Murder Club (ABC, 9:00 PM) based on the James Patterson novels ( 1st to Die ... 4th of July ), stars familiar faces Angie Harmon and Rob Estes sliding easily into new roles as Insp. Lindsay Boxer and her ex-husband-cum-superior officer Tom Hogan. The rest of the cast, all good-looking, is less familiar to me but play their professional roles and personal chemistry convincingly. Taking first in its timeslot its first three weeks on air, this adaptation is poised to have a life of its own.

Several shows received orders for additional scripts before the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike November 5. As of this writing, only Pushing Daisies had been picked up for the full season. While latenight talk shows will immediately go into repeats, most scripted primetime shows have enough unaired material to last until January 2008. Many industry analysts predict this strike could go longer than the one in 1988, which lasted 22 weeks.

Movie and TV studios are at odds with writers over how the latter should be compensated for their work in "new media" such as DVD and streaming online content. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) contends the industry doesn't make enough money to increase the writers' percentage and remain profitable. In short, I believe that with writers' work appearing in more and more venues, they should receive a greater percentage, whatever the bottom line.

Speaking of the bottom line, with home theater (DVD, HDTV) quality rivaling traditional theaters, studios could save marketing costs by releasing more features direct-to-DVD. This might mean smaller budgets for movies overall, but less money often leads to greater creativity with good results. Storyline will always matter more to me than spectacle.