Deadly Furniture

With the plethora of cop/procedural/crime dramas on our television screens, it was only a matter of time before some semi-smart producer realized that there hadn’t been one about U.S Marshals yet. These same semi-smart producers therefore created In Plain Sight, a series that revolves around the life of Mary Shannon (Mary McCormack), a marshal for the Witness Protection Program. As one would expect from such a program, each episode centers on a new, zany witness that needs to be protected/reprimanded/killed or something like that.

The show tries really hard to be different from its half-sisters. For one, it supplants its characters from the usual New York City or Los Angeles gritty, unrealistic city setting and sets it all in New Mexico. It also throws in some family characters that get more screen time then they deserve and, most importantly, creates a female main protagonist that no one in their right mind should be interested in or sympathetic towards. Okay, okay, okay. Maybe that was unfair. But it’s not that far from the truth. In an early episode (I’ll admit to watching five, but that was only out of a curiosity to see if she got any better. She doesn’t.) Mary even admits that her partner Marshall (played by Frederick Weller and the only good part of the entire series) is her one and only friend. Even that friend is looking for another job in order to get away from her (because he, for some unknown reason, likes her. But hey, he’s still trying to get away from her.)

Mary is antagonistic, uninteresting, mean, selfish, inconsistent, uncaring, and a whole lot of other unattractive things, yet we are still supposed to care about what happens to her. This would all be alright if not for the fact that she’s on the screen forty minutes out of every episode. While the interesting Marshall disappears for commercial breaks at a time, our screens are always graced by Mary. Not even a well-rounded character can stay interesting for twenty minutes straight (See M*A*S*H’s “Hawkeye” if you doubt me).

Her family isn’t much better. Although I commend the semi-smart producers for introducing a new element into a tired television style, Mary’s family is more jarring than anything else. Mary’s mother, a drunk who never really got her life together, is there more for the jokes than anything else, and Mary’s sister is there for….for something. Unlike Castle, the family drama never has anything to do with the witness-of-the-week story and so it’s all very disjointed and strange.

USA Network is known for its tagline (“Characters Welcome”) then anything else. For people who want a generally care-free, suspense-less crime procedural, In Plain Sight is a perfect fit. But for anyone who actually wants interesting characters in their television shows, look elsewhere.

Show to Watch: Castle

There is an audience out there, a pretty large audience, that loves the predictability of a procedural storyline. There’s something comforting about the fact that, although the story-of-the-week changes, there’s a known rhythm, an expected turn, a happy ending at the end of the forty-two and a half minutes. This audience is the reason why CBS is the most watched network on television--all CBS does (besides Survivor, the detestable Two and a Half Men, and other nameless, forgettable sitcoms) is procedural dramas.

However, there’s also a large audience out there that needs a variety in storytelling. We sicken at the ability to predict turns in the storyline, say what a character will say before they get around to saying it, and know that this isn’t the bad guy because we still have thirty minutes left before the show is over. These are the type of people that find their heaven in shows like Lost, The West Wing, and Battlestar Galactica--all shows that threw large curveballs (if you’ll figure the cliché baseball reference) at its audience that left them talking and pulling their hair out until the next show aired.

That being said, I have a soft spot in my heart for these CSIs, NCISs, and Cold Cases. I, in fact, was a faithful watching of CSI: The Original before the characters stopped acting like characters and refused to grow in any way possible. One of the most suspenseful hours of television from my younger, pre-Lost days was season one’s “Grave Digger,” an episode directed by Quentin Tarantino himself. Then there was the military drama JAG that, besides having perhaps the catchiest theme song before NBC’s Parks and Recreation, I still list as one of my old-school favorites. Both of these series had predictable, structured approaches to storytelling, yet I loved them anyways.

I think as a lover of television--even someone who loves the odd, the unpredictable, and the sci-fi--you’re bound to have a couple procedurals that you watch. Mine happen to be ABC’s Castle (whose success is only 90% thanks to the great and powerful Nathan Fillion) and, more recently, CBS’s The Good Wife. Nothing says that I wouldn’t like any of the other countless cop/lawyer/investigator drama’s out there. There most be something appealing about NCIS (besides the great and powerful Mark Harmon) for it to continue to get the ratings that it has, and there doesn’t look like there’s anything necessarily uninteresting about The Mentalist or Blue Bloods. But the fact is, my mind can only handle a limited number of structured, known shows at a time--and these are the two that I’ve currently chosen.

The Good Wife (airing on CBS on Tuesdays at 10) centers around Alicia (played by Julianna Marqulies), a wife whose political, state attorney husband (Chris Noth) cheats and lies. While he goes off to jail, she is left to pick up the pieces of her family and try to avoid the inevitable limelight. Thanks to her good old-friend Will (Josh Charles), she lands a job at a large, Chicago law firm where she becomes a junior associate. From there, the expected court cases start coming, but there’s a surprising amount of variety of them (murder cases, terrorist charges, civil cases, class actions) and of telling them. Add to this the fact that there’s more than a small spattering of character growth and drama as well (something that CSI had in bygone days. [Insert nostalgic sigh here]).

After watching a couple of episodes of The Good Wife, I found myself unexpectedly caring, a lot, about what happened to these characters. It isn’t just the love stories or will-they-won’t-they-tension, I cared about the friendships (notably between Alicia and Archie Panjabi’s investigator character Kalinda). I cared about whether the struggling law firm would survive so that these characters could continue to scheme. I cared that a character was fired, and almost teared up by the end of some episodes. The show also manages to bring in interesting and compelling guest stars without you even really noticing (Amy Acker and Michael J. Fox anyone?). To my shock and surprise, I suddenly realized that this was my new show to watch on Tuesday nights.

I’m sure that if I ever got around to turning on The Mentalist or the newly-dead Medium, or NCIS, I may be able to find equally compelling characters and stories behind the procedural bore. Maybe one day, when Nathan Fillion finally makes it big in the movie world and Castle has to end, I’ll watch one of them. For now, I’m too busy watching the non-structured genius of Community and Parks and Recreation.

Episodes to Watch: “Heart,” “Running,” “Breaking Up”