Crime Dramas

We used to watch the television series Law & Order. You may know there are several flavors: the straight up vanilla Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and, my favorite Law & Order: Criminal Intent with Goren and Eames. In these shows you generally start with a crime and then the cops interview several "persons of interest". Some of these "persons" appear to be straight arrows, but there are usually a couple who give you some little indication that they are not quite on the up and up. Your mission, Jim, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out which one of these characters is the guilty party. Sometimes it is more obvious than others.

Last fall we watched the series The Killing: Who Killed Rosie Larsen on Netflix. This is a little different. It starts with a crime, but we go through the entire season (13 episodes!) without finding out who dun it. The big difference though was the lack of clues. You see a character in one episode and they appear to honest, upright, law abiding citizens. Nothing in what they say or do, or how they say things gives you any indication that this is not the case. None of those subtle little indicators that we used to get in Law & Order. And then a little while later, maybe the same episode, maybe a later episode, you find out that they were lying through their teeth, so naturally you think they are guilty, but then even later you find out that whatever they were lying about has got nothing to do with case, or maybe it does . . . You see how this goes, they keep giving you clues, but never any proof. They just keep leaving you twisting in the wind.

We started watched Damages with Glenn Close this week, and it's following the same format as The Killing, one crime and then endless complications. In episode 6 Glenn Close has a bit of advice for her young protege which is "don't trust anybody". That would be good advice for the audience as well. Who knows what kind of switch-a-roos the writers are going to pull? Both Glenn Close's character and Ted Danson's character both start out as being good guys, but in short order are shown to be manipulative shit-heads. Looks like the fiance might be scumbag as well, but maybe not, maybe the other woman is crazy, or a hired assassin or maybe she is his long lost step sister from the war. Stay tuned for tomorrow's episode!