Monday night’s episode of the ABC crime series “Castle,” the second of its fourth season, signified a return to the show’s winning, quirky formula after the near-stumble of its season premiere. I’ve praised “Castle” in the past, and though its third season’s finale gave cause for worry, the series’ most recent episodes provide an object lesson in entertainment programming, especially for genre writers.

For those who haven’t seen the series, “Castle” is a semi-comic police procedural about a bestselling mystery author, Richard Castle, who finds himself partnered up with a beautiful female police detective in Manhattan, Kate Beckett, to help solve crimes. The implausible premise is no impediment to enjoying the show, as its stars Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic are both a delight to watch as the central characters; their skill as performers is evident and easy to appreciate.

In addition, and even more importantly, the gaudy premise matches the show’s narrative style; it is a throwback to the great tradition of American surrealistic mysteries of the 1930s and ’40s. That’s a very important—and, alas, currently underappreciated—trend in mystery fiction exemplified by the writings of Ellery Queen (the truest master off the form), Fredric Brown, Anthony Boucher, Craig Rice, Hake Talbot, Joel Townsley Rogers, Herbert Brean, and the other great master of the form, John Dickson Carr (and these writers all owe a debt of gratitude to the earlier British crime fiction of G. K. Chesterton, the American Jacques Futrelle, and a few others).

What these and their contemporaries excelled at was creating a sense of wonder, building a fantastic situation that has an inexorable logic of its own. In their way, they conveyed a sense of American life as a realm of astonishing possibilities ultimately grounded in common sense, logic and morality. It’s a form of fiction I enjoy greatly and which I think has much to recommend it.

“Castle” exists in that tradition. A typical episode will begin with a bizarre murder, then progress to the investigation of a series of quirky or downright bizarre suspects, witnesses, and clues while the two lead characters work out matters from their personal lives and their powerful but largely unspoken attraction to each other. It’s great fun, although the events of the show are serious and often have important implications.

Last season’s finale cliffhanger, however, went in a more overtly suspenseful and dark direction, ending with Beckett shot by a sniper as she spoke at her former boss’s funeral. It was much more like an episode of “24″ than “Castle” viewers would expect. And this season’s opening episode was much darker in tone than the usual. As Beckett recovered from her grave  injuries and the detectives investigate the attempt on her life, she and most of the other  major characters were upset with Castle for various reasons. He, too, was down in the dumps, concerned that failing to declare his love for Beckett could have made a difference in their lives.

All of this angst came off as very 1950s-Ellery Queen in approach, but that decade, alas, was not a good one for Queen.

Although the cliffhanger episode and the season opener were interesting and quite watchable, neither played to the show’s strengths.  Fortunately, last night’s episode marks a solid return to the program’s basic formula. The murders are committed by a costumed superhero who carries a samurai sword with which he cleaves a would-be rapist literally in half, from head to, well, groin.

That may sound very modern (in its spectacular grossness), but in fact it’s the kind of thing one often finds in novels by Queen, S. S. Van Diane, and others. It’s crazy but just barely possible, enough to keep you from throwing the book at the wall (for me, at least). And the scenes surrounding the murder in this “Castle” episode are handled without excessive gore– in fact, rather comically, as a morgue sequence shows two adjacent body bags holding the two halves of the body.

Castle and his daughter also work out their problems, which had left her bitter towards him in the previous week’s episode. The episode also includes some interesting background information on the world of comic book fiction, fizzy dialogue between Castle and Beckett, and several goofy suspects with weird personalities and nutty motives.

In addition, it is revealed—though not to Castle—that Beckett was indeed still conscious when he told her he loved her as she lay presumably dying at the end of the previous season’s cliffhanger episode. It’s a very good plot development which holds promise for much irony and emotional dueling in future episodes.

So, what’s the lesson here for genre writers and admirers alike? It’s all right to wander outside the boundaries once in a while, but the boundaries are there for a reason: because the conventions of any particular genre work. They come into being, after all, because people literally buy the narratives that take on that form. And I would posit that people like these narrative conventions because they speak the truth to them in a pleasing way.

“Castle” does this too—and that, I believe, is what makes it both popular and deserving of its success.

Directed by Jon Favreau (the Iron Man films, Elf, Zathura) from a script by multiple hands, Cowboys & Aliens has plenty of energy and action and is quite enjoyable, but it suffers from a curious lack of interesting plot twists and a rather glaring casting misstep. Most classic Westerns, contrary to contemporary beliefs, were given excellent, complex plots with strong character motivations. Unfortunately, the plot of Cowboys & Aliens is relatively simple.

We know from the film’s title and trailers that aliens are going to attack in the Old West, and it’s axiomatic that once that happens, the earthlings will fight back. So, no surprises there. Once the Western-standard mysterious stranger Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) arrives in town, we know the aliens won’t be far behind. And once he poses a challenge to the rule of the Western-standard arrogant ranch king Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), we know that the two will reconcile at some point in order to fight the aliens together.

The same is true of the choices made by Dolarhyde’s arrogant idiot son, Percy, Indian guide Nat Colorado (Adam Beach), and the tribe of Apache Indians who capture the small band of people fighting the aliens. Colorado is a likeable character, thanks to Beach’s understated performance and his character’s interesting and laudable longing to be a valued member of the society and in particular of Dolarhyde’s ranch team. Unfortunately, he’s not seen all that much.

The Apaches inject dramatic energy and an amusing element of political incorrectness in their savage, unruly celebration after capturing a group of white settlers. But none of them are given complex or particularly unusual characters. Of course, although classic Hollywood Westerns showed the Indians in a much more positive light than contemporary film historians acknowledge, they weren’t always given characters as complex as the protagonists’, just as is the case here. That’s natural to any story: the subsidiary characters aren’t explored as deeply as the main ones. And in Cowboys & Aliens, as in the best Westerns of Hollywood’s golden age, the Indians are shown making real, reasoned choices, which is a nice throwback to the classic Western approach.

Another plus is actor Walt Goggins, who is amusing as Hunt, one of the villains. Alas, he, too, doesn’t get nearly enough screen time to make a sufficient impact.

There’s one interesting plot twist involving mysterious lady Ella Swenson (Olivia Wilde, Tron Legacy, Year One, House), but even that is obvious fairly early on, given her rather strange behavior.

Where this film most differs from the classic Hollywood Western is in the decision to cast two extremely stolid, unemotional actors to play the stoic and fairly formulaic main characters, Lonergan and Dolarhyde. Although they’ve both been successful as action heroes, neither Craig nor Ford conveys much personality these days, and as a result they sap some of the potential energy from the film.

When one considers the great Western actors of the past, what stands out is the personal touch each one brought to the genre—John Wayne’s humor, Jimmy Stewart’s emotional vulnerability, Randolph Scott’s grit and determination. (Clint Eastwood set the pattern for today’s taciturn, joyless Western hero/antihero.)

Likewise, the great villains of the past, such as Barton MacLane, Jack Palance, Walter Brennan (also one of the world’s greatest sidekicks), Eli Wallach, and Lee Marvin, brought a delightfully perverse joy to their villainy—it’s interesting to note how many of their memorable scenes show these characters smiling or even grinning as they do their evil deeds. The contemporary cliché is that nobody in the Wild West ever smiled. It’s silly, false, and dramatically limiting, and it’s a shame that Cowboys & Aliens doesn’t transcend that. Ford, in particular, doesn’t manage to inject much humanity into his character until the film nears its climax.

These are problems that prevent Cowboys & Aliens from reaching its full potential, but the film has a great deal going for it. It includes a good deal of Christian imagery, some of it overly obvious (beginning with the town’s name, Absolution) but laudable nonetheless, and the Christian theme of personal redemption is evident throughout the film. The latter is not a necessary choice of theme for a film about alien attacks, and hence it is to the filmmaker’s credit for including it. In addition the film includes a personal, Christlike sacrifice which is emotionally and thematically satisfying.

A further and perhaps even more effective Christian element is the presence of a fascinating and complex character: the local parson, Meacham. Superbly played by Clancy Brown, Parson Meacham is a clearly sincere and knowledgeable Christian, and he’s no sissy. He can handle a gun quite well, and he teaches one of the characters how to shoot. He even gets the drop on Lonergan when the latter first arrives in town. Meacham is a truly unusual character, and I would be happy to see an entire movie with him as the central character or the protagonist’s best friend. Unfortunately, for reasons I won’t reveal so as not to spoil the story for those who haven’t seen the film, Meacham, too, is not in many scenes and is given suitable prominence in even fewer.

Also, as the historical/fantasy novelist Lars Walker has observed, the filmmakers make a very important choice in treating the story seriously, and not tarting it up with irony. Had they done the latter, audience involvement would have been undermined radically, perhaps fatally.

Like the great Westerns of the past, Cowboys & Aliens has some highly interesting characters in subsidiary roles—Meacham, Hunt, and Colorado. Where it differs from the classics is in the central characters, who are less engaging than they should be. Personally, I would have liked to see much more from such smartly drawn and well-acted characters—but of course that would leave much less time for the sci-fi elements. All of this suggests that I would rather watch a classic Western than a modern sci-fi film. I confess: mea maxima culpa.

So don’t get me wrong: Cowboys & Aliens is quite enjoyable and diverting, and its themes are praiseworthy. It’s rather boldly Christian and politically incorrect at times, which I appreciate. It could have been more interesting and insightful into the human condition, but these saving graces make it a worthwhile summer popcorn film.

But, boy, when is Hollywood going to remember how to make a real Western?

Both characters annoyed me in essence, I suspect, because they were such perfect specimens of a particularly common and grating type of contemporary American: the Priggish Urban Liberal-Progressive Busybody Knowitall Pseudointellectual Snob. And in doing so, the show conveyed a point of view firmly based on authoritarianism, exemplifying the contemporary worldview that the political writer Jonah Goldberg calls liberal fascism.

I imagine that the unappealing character type at the center of Law and Order: Criminal Intent hardly requires any further description for most readers, as it thoroughly infests current-day TV news and talk shows, newspaper columns, Slate and the Huffington Post and other fashionable politico-cultural websites, contemporary art shows, your neighborhood Starbucks, and other such locales made repellant by their presence.

Sunday night’s episode on the USA Network, the last in the series, had a story line typical of the show’s ten-season run. Several people fighting over profits from a highly popular website are the suspects in the murders of two of the parties in the legal dispute over ownership of the site. Once again, that is, the culprits are big-business bigwigs, which makes for more interesting settings than the usual domestic violence or street crimes that most murders result from, but it is of course ludicrously fanciful for a show that has been fairly realistic in its depiction of police procedures (and which the producers seemed to take a good deal of pride in). In that way Law and Order: Criminal Intent was a thoroughly conventional example of the mystery-crime genre.

The show’s distinguishing feature was Det. Goren’s interest in pursuing each case through an unsystematic but highly intense amateur psychological examination of the various suspects, as suggested in the show’s title. These motives typically showed all Americans outside the East Coast elite as being infected with a variety of irrational and dangerous thoughts.

Chief among these, the show made clear, is religion, and by that they meant Christianity, not religion in general. From the very first season, this was established as an important element of the show. Episode four, “The Faithful,” dealt with a financial scandal in a Catholic church, and in episode eleven, “The Third Horseman,” both Goren and Eames explicitly state their pro-abortion views. (The assistant district attorney, played by Courtney B. Vance, briefly states that he is anti-abortion, but this is quickly dismissed, and one can see that the producers are giving him a free pass for occasional political correctness because the character is black. The racist implications of that free pass are interesting, by the way, and would have been unusual and valuable for the show to explore, but of course that was unlikely given that they are clearly the producers’ own attitudes.)

The progressive-authoritarian political agenda was strongly evident in the story lines and dialogue throughout the run of the series, but D’Onofrio and Erbe added much to the effect by conveying it continually through their facial expressions, gestures, and vocal inflections. The smug looks they passed to each other during their interrogations of suspects were downright insufferable, given the enormous power these detectives were given to detain people, subject them to intense questioning, and manipulate them psychologically in the attempt to send them to prison for felonies. The unfairness of the situation must strike most people as appalling, but it seems perfectly natural to these urban progressive-authoritarian prigs, and evidently to the producers. (I suspect that audiences’ discomfort with the Goren character is one thing that kept the show from attaining consistent popularity.)

And in accordance with contemporary progressive-authoritarian shibboleths, the thing that most powerfully offends Goren and Eames is hypocrisy. They accept degenerate behavior as none of their business, except when engaged in by people who claim to stand for decency and righteousness. Of course, Goren and Eames stand for decency and righteousness while abusing their authority, but that’s never brought into question. Hypocrisy is not a flaw when progressive-authoritarian prigs engage in it.

Speaking of intimidation, throughout the run of the series D’Onofrio was notable for his habit of looming into an individual’s personal space by edging ever-closer to the person, using his size (he is tall, bulky, and pudgy) to intimidate them. This was something Goren seemed particularly inclined to do to wealthy, successful people. The poor, by contrast, didn’t usually get that sort of treatment. Of course, since the latter were seldom actual suspects and had little sense of personal power, he had less desire to intimidate them, as he seemed well aware that the crimes he was chosen to investigate were always committed by the rich and powerful, and in particular those from the private sector, not government.

This season, D’Onofrio brought the physical intimidation to a new and even more disturbing level. In each episode he would at some point or another grab, push, or lean against a suspect, progressing from mere  looming to actual physical contact. He would use just a little extra but nonetheless noticeable excessive force in shoving a person into a chair or through a door. In every instance, moreover, the person thus ill-treated is not under arrest but merely a “person of interest.” Tellingly, Goren always stops just short of actions that would be clearly identifiable as police brutality. This strikes me as even more sinister, cowardly, and unjustifiable. In not one case does the suspect protest against this mistreatment. This I find especially revealing of the producers’ intent, as it suggests to the viewer that this is to be taken as perfectly normal and acceptable behavior.

And although Goren often got into trouble within the department during the course of the series, it was a result of his battles with his superiors, not his intimidation of suspects. Here too, the show indicates a thoroughly authoritarian point of view: you answer to your superiors, not the public.

Of course, it’s important to acknowledge that Law and Order: Criminal Intent had a good many appealing characteristics. The New York City settings were usually interesting, the plots were often somewhat engrossing, and the guest characters introduced in each episode were frequently quite astutely observed and portrayed. The show was often very effective television, though it was never very popular. In addition, the central characters of series often stated a laudable, liberal appreciation for diversity, freedom, and other such ideals. Unfortunately, this comes off as little more than cant, given their authoritarian behavior. Yet the statement of the sentiments has some value, I presume. Moreover, the central characters clearly are trying to do good, to bring criminals to justice and help strengthen the social order.

In addition, it’s important to remember that the depiction of an action or personality trait in a work of art or culture does not in itself prove that the creator approves of it. In the case of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, however, the consistency of the behavior of the lead characters and its conformity with the choice of story lines and villains makes it clear that the show is conveying a particular mentality. Other detectives occasionally featured in the series, played by Christopher Noth and Jeff Goldblum (when D’Onofrio’s personal problems forced the producers to remove him from the lead role), were not quite as obvious in conveying this smugness, but it’s notable that the producers always returned to D’Onofrio as protagonist and kept him in place for the entire final season this spring. (In fact, Noth’s character was not a priggish urban progressive-authoritarian at all, but that was because his character had been brought over from the show’s parent series, Law and Order.)

In all, then, I think it’s clear that the show sends a consistent and obvious message, conveyed through the central characters’ continual physical, psychological, and legal intimidation of people not convicted of any crime or even under formal arrest.

It is this: we are living in a police state, a society in which the government has unlimited authority over the individual. And this, the producers appear strongly to suggest, is a good thing, as it results in the restoration of order at the end of each episode (albeit with the occasional cheesy irony or fashionable ambiguity), as mysteries tend to do. The fact that this “order” involves the reduction of citizens into subjects, of taxpayers into servants of a privileged elite through the continual threat of violence by police, seems of little consequence to the producers, as it is never dealt with fundamentally and critically in the show’s story lines.

It is an implication evident from any reasonably attentive watching of the show, as the analysis here suggests, and there are only two ways it can have happened. One, the attitude is so ingrained in the producers’ minds that they did not notice it, or, two, they consciously intended it. I think that the former is probably the case, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. In its essence and despite some surface claims of approval of liberty, Law and Order: Criminal Intent is thoroughly authoritarian in its implications. I, for one, am not at all sad to see it go.

In fact, ABC’s Castle web page today opens with the following pop-up window inviting visitors to take an extensive survey regarding the episode and the show in general (which I dutifully filled out):

We would like to invite you to participate in a short survey about the episode of CASTLE that aired on 2/28/11. This episode featured Castle and Beckett rejoining Fallon’s task force, the detectives suspecting a former U.S. soldier of planning a terrorist attack, and Castle and Beckett partnering with a Syrian official to track down the bomb.

Having seen the episode, I can assure you that the story cannot be fairly characterized as bigoted or anti-Christian.

The episode, “Countdown,” is the conclusion of a two-parter in which the show’s protagonists (NYC police detective Kate Beckett and her unpaid-consultant partner, mystery writer Richard Castle) attempt to prevent a mass murder through detonation of a nuclear “dirty bomb” in Manhattan. (Note: spoilers hereafter.)

In part 1, viewers were led to believe that the conspirators were Muslims from foreign countries. In “Countdown,” however, it soon becomes clear that the main villain is non-Muslim (though not characterized as a Christian), and the Muslims in the story are being used as scapegoats by him and his associates in a rather silly and fanciful scheme to revive Americans’ interest in our recent Middle East wars by exploding a dirty bomb in Manhattan and planting evidence so that it will be blamed on Muslim terrorists.

However, unlike in other stories of this kind which I have seen in the past couple of years, a credible character—Castle himself—expresses sympathy with the man’s aims while of course decrying his intent to commit mass murder and mayhem to achieve them. It is in fact rather surprising to see Castle do so, and I think that this element in itself redeems the episode entirely.

In addition, the narrative also points out that a character initially seen as unattractive and hardhearted is driven to act that way out of unresolved grief over the death of his wife in tower two of the World Trade Center, her having “ridden the tower down” to her death at the hands of Muslim terrorists. This reminder can hardly be seen as pro-Muslim or anti-Christian.

In no way, in my view, can this episode be fairly characterized as anti-Christian, pro-Muslim, or bigoted. As noted above, I find the story’s terrorism scheme to be fanciful, but I believe it to have been motivated by a desire to create a relatively surprising resolution to the mystery (and, alas, failing to make it either convincing or surprising, in my estimation), not any sense of prejudice or desire to make a political point. To the extent that the story is less than laudable, the reasons are aesthetic, not political or religious.

Moreover, the first sequence of the episode, in which Castle and Beckett are locked in a subzero refrigerated container with no way of escaping or informing anyone of their predicament, is an extraordinarily powerful scene and quite poignant, something regular or even casual viewers of the serious should not miss. The two characters face a slow, painful death together while individually confronting what appears to be a rather desperate love for each other which neither can find the courage to express. The scene suggests so much about the human condition, how one’s love for another can create an intense fear that makes that emotion all but unendurable and impossible to admit.

A similarly powerful and understated dramatic moment occurs when Castle tells his mother and his daughter to leave town but cannot admit why and insists that they tell no one else, lest it lead to a citywide panic. Later, Castle realizes that another character faces such emotional wrenching and vexing moral dilemmas every day.

Moments such as these are rather unusual in contemporary drama and are to be praised. Yes, “Countdown” has aesthetic flaws, but in my view they’re mistakes, not manifestations of prejudice.

This article originally published at The American Culture.

That, of course, was just their public face; in reality, it soon became clear, they are ugly and reptilian under their human skins and have an agenda to exploit humanity in some way, either as slaves or as food or both, or perhaps some even worse and more horrible fashion. And a small group of people have divined this agenda and set up a small, loose, but dedicated resistance organization.

Central to the narrative is the resistance against an intrusive government that claims to be for nothing but the good of humanity but is in fact pursuing sinister, elitist, and exploitative hidden agendas. As such, the show makes a strong commentary on contemporary political issues and constitutes one of the most frankly libertarian TV series seen in many years. In addition, it suggests strong approval of religion, specifically Christianity, in a way that makes the resistance group a spot-on analogue to the current-day Tea Party movement.

In episode 5, “Welcome to the War,” for example, the “visitors” clearly display the trappings of an oppressive government: claims of exclusively benevolent intentions; a large, complex organization devoted to the will of a single leader and small cadre of elite satraps; exercise of raw power against opposition whenever it can be accomplished in secret; use of sympathetic media mouthpieces and propaganda techniques; highly advanced military power and surveillance capabilities; vastly greater power than the people over whom they want to rule; use of deception and scapegoating  in order to undermine resistance; and the like.

A member of the Christian clergy, Father Jack Landry (characterized excellently by Joel Gretsch), remains central to the resistance effort, along with FBI agent Erica Evans (likewise well played by Elizabeth Mitchell). Both are determined, kindly, and fundamentally decent and unselfish. Father Jack continually wears the traditional turned-around collar identifying him as a clergyman.

Leading the visitors, by contrast, is Anna, an extremely charismatic woman whose appearance includes both Caucasian and African characteristics. Anna claims to be for treating all people as equals and helping those who haven’t been successful in life, stopping just short of directly quoting President Obama and other progressive politicians. As the show progressed through its first season, however, she was increasingly revealed as a cold-hearted monster whose words of benevolence are entirely phony.

In episode 8, “We Can’t Win,”, for example, one of the V leaders describes flooding caused by a monsoon, which has possibly killed thousands of people, as a “tragedy.” “No,” says Anna, smiling triumphantly, “an opportunity,” echoing the words of former Obama aide Rahm Emanuel. Later, Anna tells a sympathetic journalist, “There’s tragedy every day all over your world. So many opportunities to help.”

In that same episode, Anna and the visitors continually refer to their takeover plans as “progress,” an apparent allusion to contemporary statists’ self-description as progressives.

As noted, the religious orientation of the show is strongly Christian. The leaders of the resistance use a church as their base of operations, and the climactic scene of “Welcome to the War” takes place in the church’s sanctuary. The church thus serves as a source of sound, eternal values and gives emotional strength to the resistance. The resistance members are clearly shown to be in the movement to protect their families, faith, freedom, and personal integrity.

In another positive allusion to Christianity, resistance member Georgie sacrifices his life to ensure that he won’t give away the identities of the other resisters, an evident allusion to Christ and to subsequent Christian martyrs. The show doesn’t avoid difficult moral quandaries, either: in “We Can’t Win,” Father Jack shoots a human agent of the Visitors.

The Visitors, too, recognize the power of religion, but they use it to their own ends. Erica’s teenage son, Tyler, becomes interested in “The Church of V” concocted by the Visitors as another means of distracting people from their real intentions.

In addition to the human resistance, among the aliens are some good individuals who sympathize with the humans. In fact, “John May,” the first V to turn against Anna, actually started the resistance. His name is of course reminiscent of John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. Two prominent aliens working against their government are given biblical names, Joshua and Samuel.

Episode 9, “Heretic’s Fork,” includes allusions to Nazi eugenics programs, with V doctors performing experiments on live human subjects. These events also resonate with contemporary issues such as elective abortion and embryonic stem cell research, however, as when Anna refers to an unborn V-human hybrid baby as a “mongrel” and insists it should be put to death in the womb. In “We Can’t Win” she kills an unborn Visitor just to make a point in a personal conversation.

The media’s role in pushing for big government is also prominent in the show. Newsman Chad Decker (Scott Wolf), for example, offers to do a story about the Fifth Column, the small group of humans who distrust the visitors. “Just point me in the right direction,” he tells Anna. Later, he meets Father Jack in the latter’s rectory and asks him for information about the Fifth Column. Jack says he doesn’t know anything, and this and a subsequent scene leave it ambiguous as to whether Chad is really cooperating with the visitors or acting as a double agent.

As the season progresses we find that the resistance, have been falsely branded as terrorists, and FBI agent Erica is assigned to head task force to find fifth columnists, Visitors who oppose their leaders’ plan to exploit humanity.

All of that leads to “Red Sky,” the finale of season one. The Vs are about to attack the earth openly and take over. A fifth columnist willingly gives up his own life to save all of mankind and his fellow Fifth Columnists, in a Christlike sacrifice. Tellingly, the Fifth Columnist is named Joshua, the Old Testament translation of the Jewish name translated as Jesus in the New Testament. Later in the episode, Joshua is resurrected, literally brought back to life.

After Joshua’s killing, Father Jack preaches a sermon in which he tells his congregation, “You are going to have to choose who you’re going to follow: the V’s or God. Because you can’t serve two masters. . . . There is a war upon us: a war for our souls.”

The war resumes tonight.

All three of those shows were a little off the beaten path, a bit quirky, not the ordinary run of police procedural. Given the decidedly mixed results of that strategy (one that fits with ABC’s basic programming approach, which has mined the mildly quirky vein since the late 1950s), it’s no surprise that with Detroit 1-8-7 the Alphabet is trying a show much more in line with current-day police procedural formulas. And wonder of wonders, audiences like it, so far.

—–

Viewers gave it a B+ in the USA Today audience poll, second-best among the twenty-one series rated, and it finished second in its time-slot last week, behind CBS’s The Good Wife, with 7.4 million viewers (Good Wife having grabbed 11.8 million). Reviewers were less enthusiastic, giving it a 64 out of a 100 on Metacritic.

The show is definitely formulaic. It takes place in the mangled urban landscape of current-day Detroit and follows the workings of a homicide squad. (187 is the traditional police radio code for homicide.) The nominal protagonist is Det. Louis Fitch (Michael Imperioli), but each member of the team is given a goodly amount of screen time.

Each episode follows two main criminal investigations, named in the episode’s title. In the untitled pilot (although it could be called “Pharmacy Double; Bullet Train,” as those are the two investigations, so named in on-screen titles), one team of detectives investigates a double murder at a convenience store, and the other looks into the shooting of a divorce lawyer whose body was found on a freight train.

Imperioli’s Fitch is the hard-nosed, easily angered ethnic type, a contemporary Serpico clone. He initially refuses to talk to his partner except on the telephone, even when they’re together in the same room, but “he gets results,” as one of his fellow detectives says. The other detectives and officers are likewise formulaic and mildly quirky: a new detective worried about his wife’s pregnancy; a competent and stable middle-aged detective who has bought a house in Tuscany and dreams of escape; a vaguely world-weary woman in her thirties; a young male officer ridiculed for having been a calendar model; a man of Indian extraction who’s emphatically American in his tastes; and so on.

The stories are not particularly clever, nor apparently intended to be. It’s all supposed to strike us as very real, it seems. (Your mileage may vary.) Thus there’s the usual witness questioning, car chases, suspect interrogations, examination of murder victims’ corpses, weepy next-of-kin death notifications, mass shootouts, hostage crisis, and the like. In addition (spoiler alert) the pilot episode includes the now-cliched would-be shock ending in which one of the central characters is shot and presumably killed.

All of this is pretty much as by-the-numbers as it sounds, but the horribly deteriorated condition of Detroit and the unglamorous but quietly heroic character of the police officers give the show an appearance of gritty urban realism. The visual style is a straight steal from The Wire, however, so viewers of that classic crime drama might not find that aspect of Detroit 1-8-7 to be particularly original either.

There is some attempt to create some audience sympathy for the victims’ friends and relatives and some mixed feelings toward the suspects, which is a sensible approach. Unfortunately, this typically takes the form of having the victims’ relatives and friends indicate their emotions directly, using dialogue and acting techniques to convey sadness, concern, suspicion of the the police officers’ motives, etc., instead of establishing the emotions through dramatic actions. That’s a poor second-best choice.

Last week’s episode, “Royal Bubbles; Needle Drop,” continued the everyday urban nightmare story lines, dealing with the torture and murder of a money-laundering car wash owner and the killing of a young, aspiring hip-hop star. In each case, however, we don’t see the murder committed, nor do we see much gore (although there is some of that). The show avoids sensationalism in that regard.

This story, too, however, plays out in largely formulaic fashion, though there is some interesting exploration of the theme of family loyalty. In addition, there are some nice moments at the end of the episode, when each pair of detectives is bonded closer together by a small act of friendship.

Those are the kinds of things the showmakers really enjoy the most, one suspects, and Detroit 1-8-7 would benefit from more such attention to real-life concerns of that sort, ones with which audience can identify and sympathize. The rest of the time it’s neither original enough nor sufficiently involving to stand out from the crowd.

Bruckheimer’s latest new series (one of two this year), the police drama Chase (NBC, Tonight, 10 p.m. EDT), is up against a big challenge: Monday Night Football on CBS, the established hit cop show Castle on ABC, and the new hit cop show Hawaii Five-0 on CBS. Add to that a relatively weak lead-in from The Event (which is getting killed in the ratings by ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and CBS’s Two and a Half Men), plus a lackluster reaction from those who have seen the show (a C+ rating in the USA Today audience poll—14th out of the 21 new shows), and things do not look good for Chase.

That’s a pity because the show has some good things to offer. The central character is Annie Frost, a U.S. Marshall based in Houston, Texas, who is tasked with tracking down escaped fugitives. Nothing new there, of course, and Frost is struggling with personal demons of her own, which is one of the biggest cliches of contemporary crime fiction. She has endured traumas—her mother died when Frost was eight years old, and Frost’s father was apparently a raffish character involved in as-yet-unidentified misdeeds. She describes him as “a dad who confuses right and wrong.” This background seems to be what leads her to take excessive risks on the job—and her recklessness is presented as a moral failing.

Frost appears to be in her thirties and is blond and reasonably attractive but not glamorous. That, too, is all par for the course. But as played by Kelli Giddish, Frost is interesting, a very hard, driven woman whose choices can occasionally surprise. There’s a visible emotional intensity about her that seems to be always a bit more than the situation demands, especially when contrasted with the more even-keel demeanor of partner Jimmy Godfrey (Cole Hauser). There’s always a sense that Frost might do something crazy, like a milder version of Mel Gibson’s Riggs in the Lethal Weapon movies. She never really does, but that risk seems always to be there, and intended by the showmakers.

In narrative terms Chase is basically a straightforward contemporary police procedural with a small team of officers looking for clues; questioning witnesses; discussing the case in their common room while team leader Frost points to words and photos on a whiteboard; chasing criminals in cars, helicopters, on foot, and even in a river; and engaging in gun- and fistfights. Its story lines are pretty much what the show’s title suggests.

Visually, Chase emphasizes dark, underlit scenes, in the contemporary crime show style (even the daylight scenes are murky), and its stories accord a significant amount of screen time to the criminal, who is identified very early on.

The episodes shown so far establish the show as straightforwardly concerned with law and order. Some attention is given to analyzing clues to the killer’s psychology, but only as a way of figuring out where he is, not to diminish the sense that he’s responsible for his actions.

In that light, an interesting element of the show is the criminals’ attachment to elements of bourgeois home life. In the pilot episode, the killer has a young daughter whom he clearly loves.  In episode 3, “The Comeback Kid,” the criminal, a former Boston hitman, has been living a simple life with a good woman for 17 years, before a bad investment (probably the result of a scam perpetrated against him) and an encounter with three thugs set him off on a killing spree, and he is later confronted by double-crossing gunrunners.

None of this, however, is employed to diminish either criminal’s responsibility for his actions. The attachment to family is not shown as proving that the criminal is good at heart. Far from it, in fact: it tends to suggest that the criminal is willfully turning his back on a normal life in order to pursue morally wrong ends.  Moreover, in “The Comeback Kid” the additional wrongdoings by others serve to indicate the pervasiveness of crime in contemporary society. One gets the sense that this last element is meant less as a realistic depiction of the world than as a symbolic representation of original sin.

“When I was your age, I was renting penthouses with Harvard-educated hookers,” the hitman brags to two lowlife gangsters whom he’s about to kill. Clearly, then, his choice of a simple, bourgeois life was not a moral decision but a simple strategic matter, using the new identity as a sort of personal witness-protection program to keep himself from being tracked down by his former employers or angry associates of his past victims.

That sort of smart writing and morally uncompromising point of view are nicely original and true to life, and they help balance out the more formulaic aspects of Chase. It’s interesting to see a police drama—or any kind of TV series—with such an intense, continual examination of moral issues and uncompromising assertion of individual responsibility.

Whether that can save Chase from an early grave, however, remains in great doubt at this point.

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The opening scenes of the pilot episode establish a strongly positive view of the police, conveying a sense that the great majority go into the job with some amount of idealism, even if the system is prone to corruption. We meet the Reagan family, a multigenerational clan of New York City police officers, currently led by Police Chief Frank Reagan (Selleck). His son, Detective Danny Reagan (Wahlberg), is called away from a graduation ceremony for new police officers, where his Harvard-educated brother is one of the new-minted coppers.

All of this sets up the ideal against which the show then compares the reality of policing a major American city. The case to which Danny Reagan is called concerns a daylight kidnapping of a young girl off a New York City street. Reagan and partner Demarcus King (Flex Alexander) follow up on a meager allotment of clues, pressed hard by a pair of urgent deadlines: the awareness that the odds of recovering a kidnap victim unharmed raise exponentially with each passing hour, and, perhaps equally important in their minds, pressure from the mayor and other political figures to avert the inevitable public relations nightmare a killing would create.

Thus the pilot foregrounds the problems of politics, public skepticism toward the department, ethnic unrest, and police brutality. The latter is manifested in a scene in which Danny Reagan repeatedly holds a suspect’s head underwater in a toilet, in order to force him to reveal where the man has hidden the kidnapped girl. Reagan succeeds in getting the information, but at the cost of jeopardizing the possibility of convicting the man in a court of law because the coerced confession taints all evidence that arises from it.

In addition, new officer and Harvard grad Jamie Reagan is recruited into a top-secret investigation of an allegedly corrupt and violent group within the NYPD called the Blue Templar—who allegedly killed Jamie’s brother Joe. It sounds rather highly fanciful to me, but I’m no expert on secret societies, so I guess I can’t complain.

Some critics and viewers may inevitably worry about identity-politics implications, and there are some things in Blue Bloods to ponder in that regard. I don’t find the show to suffer from any clear bias toward either side of what passes for a political spectrum these days. The kidnapper is a Catholic who reportedly performs a perverse first communion ceremony during his killings. Yet the show doesn’t suggest that Christianity is for weirdos—the Reagans say grace before their Sunday dinner together, and it comes off as a sincere and appealing moment.

That dinner becomes very raucous shortly thereafter, as Danny and his sister, Erin, a public prosecutor, argue about whether torture can ever be justified, a debate which the rest of the family joins with the expected level of passion. The side arguing that whatever might save an innocent person’s life is justified seems to me to win the debate—rather surprisingly, given the way the subject is usually treated in the media.

The scene is emblematic of the show’s refreshing approach: balanced and realistic about the temptations of power, while recognizing that the rules shouldn’t serve the interests of wrongdoers and neglect to protect the innocents. Societies give great power to the police, out of necessity, and as Lord Acton noted, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The pilot episode of Blue Bloods dramatized this dilemma admirably.

The episode did very well with audiences on its premiere night two weeks ago, with Blue Bloods finishing as the second-highest rated new show, after Hawaii Five-0, garnering 13.0 million viewers.

Episode 2, “Samaritan,” which premiered last week, follows up on the pilot episode’s themes adds an interesting, broader look at how the justice system puts citizens in an awful dilemma by claiming a monopoly on the use of force, denying people the right to protect themselves from violence.

The episode deals with the search for and prosecution of a man who shot one of a gang of robbers and rapists on a subway train. The shooter and thugs are both of the same ethnic group, which removes that element from the story and puts the focus where it is most important:  on the vigilante aspect of the story and the way the system punishes people who protect themselves and others.

The latter is obviously a perversion of justice, but the producers wisely refrain from pushing the viewer to a particular conclusion about it. Instead, the let the viewer draw their own conclusion after another of the post-supper debates among the Reagan family that seem likely to become a regular occurrence in the series. One thing, however, is made very clear: the laws of the state and city put the “vigilante” in an impossible position. The city’s “no tolerance” gun laws made this honest citizen a criminal by making it illegal for him to do what any sensible person would strive to do: make sure that he can protect himself and other from violence.

The viewer is led to understand this truth but is allowed to draw their own conclusions about whether the trade off is worth making. As Benjamin Franklin said, those willing to trade liberty for security will have neither, but “Samaritan” refrains from forcing that conclusion on the audience. Bringing it to people’s attention, however, is a laudable thing. As is Blue Bloods in general.

The show is on life-support after debuting to an anemic total of 4.8 million viewers. It might last a little while, since it’s from Jerry Bruckheimer Productions, the makers of the successful CSI franchise and numerous other hit shows but also several unsuccessful series in recent years (such as Miami Medical and The Forgotten), but the lack of audience excitement (a C+ in USA Today’s audience poll) suggests it’s going to be a tough slog.

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The show is certainly not bad, just not particularly compelling. Its biggest flaw appears to be the lack of any particularly likable characters among the leads. The latter seems an odd choice, especially given that there’s nothing in the concept to suggest the central characters couldn’t have had some charm, and the performers chosen to play them have a history of decent audience appeal.

The concept is not only workable but in fact rather smart. It’s a legal show depicting both sides of a trial, as the prosecuor and defense both preapare their cases and then present them—to the jury and the TV audience. I can’t think of any specific instances offhand, but I imagine that this has been done before in a TV series, yet so has everything else. Thus it’s what the producers do with the concept that counts.

Their choice is to take a generally somber tone. Rob Morrow and Maura Tierney star as a defense lawyer and prosecutor, respectively, who were lovers during their law school days. The two remain friends but are somewhat antagonist in their personal relationship as well as in their opposing courtroom work. Tierney’s character seems to carry some special resentment toward Morrow’s, though her exact complaint was not made evident in the pilot.

With this rather unpleasant relationship as a backdrop, the pilot episode includes the expected controversial content in the legal case:  a high school teacher is accused of having raped and killed one of his students. Ethnic tensions are brought out, as the accused is a non-Hispanic Caucasian and the victim is a Hispanic female.

An early scene skillfully conveys the agony of the murder victim’s family and the worries and fears of the accused and his family. Bringing the ethnic tensions to the fore, hardnosed, determined prosecutor Kathryn Peale (Tierney) pursues the case as a hate crime on the basis of a student’s claim that the accused once said he hates “Spics.” Confident, resourceful defense attorney James T. Brogan (Morrow) explores every possible way of undermining the prosecution’s case, as is the convention in such situations.

The story then becomes a murder mystery in which the clues are uncovered through the simultaneous separate investigations by both the prosecution and defense as they build their cases—a very promising concept, as noted earlier.

All of this is distinctly reminiscent of the numerous contemporary UK TV crime series in which gloomy people confront dismal situations. Visually The Whole Truth has the dingy look common among contemporary U.S. crime shows, and it also involves the usual surprise revelations, cliched competitive banter between prosecutor and defense lawyer, arguments and competition within the legal teams, an open homosexual among the main characters, a wise African-American as authority figure, and other such overly worn conventions of the genre.

On the plus side, although the ethnic and gender angles are exploited as ways to spice up the story, they also present a fairly realistic look at how these issues affect political and social behavior.

As the story plays out, the prosecutor and defense attorney function in the classic role of mystery fiction detectives, and their summations before the jury at the end of the trial function as a pair of competing solutions offered at the traditional Gathering of the Suspects that’s a staple of the genre. The jury’s decision functions as the revelation of the murderer, though an astute person might still harbor doubts. Hence the writers include a coda indicating whether the jury got it right. I think it’s a good idea.

It’s one of many good ideas in the series, starting with the show’s basic concept. If the series can survive long enough for the producers to correct its unnecessarily dreary tone, The Whole Truth might just make it.

That verdict, however, may already have been determined by the initial audience reaction to the show, as the broadcast TV networks are highly reluctant to give a series a chance to find its way and connect with audiences. And that’s the sad truth about TV these days.

It was NBC’s ambitions, inherited from the innovative TV programmer Sylvester “Pat” Weaver in the 1950s, that led to expensive, high-concept shows such as Kings, Heroes, The Event, and the like (note the high-flown titles of these series). Even last season’s Tonight Show debacle can be seen as part of this trend, an attempt at innovation and specialness on the cheap.

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This approach has failed at least as often as it has succeeded—NBC’s ratings were seldom spectacular under Weaver; CBS tended to rule the roost then, as today. In fact NBC’s greatest success in the post-Weaver years was the Brandon Tartikoff era, when the former ABC program exec wedded  the network’s typical ambition and thirst for innovation with a smart quest for personable actors and entertaining concepts.

With Zucker now on the way out and Jeff Gaspin installed as board chairman, NBC appears to be trying to return to the Tartikoff approach, and the new series Undercovers (Wednesdays, 8 p.m. EDT) is a good example of the changes at the network.

It’s another action-adventure  series in the mid-1960s style (like Fox’s Human Target and Fringe and much of the USA Network’s original programming). Created by J. J. Abrams, creator of Alias, Lost, Fringe, and the Star Trek reboot movie, Undercovers is not particularly original, but that may actually be a good sign. Following the pattern established by Fox and the USA Network (and taking a cue from NBC’s glory days under Tartikoff) is probably more sensible than continuing down the same unsuccessful path NBC has trodden in the past decade.

The show is also an unacknowledged remake of the mid-1960s NBC comedy-drama espionage series I Spy, which starred Bill Cosby and Robert Culp as secret agents for the Pentagon who travel the world as a tennis bum (Culp) and his manager (Cosby) and encounter adventure in exotic locales. This nod to the past, like other such formula elements in the series, is actually a good thing: Abrams and his team are smart enough to learn from the past and use what works, and then put their own original spin on it.

Like I Spy or a Fox or USAN show, the pilot episode of Undercovers opens with action scene; this one is set in and on the roof of a fancy high-rise hotel. It’s pretty much by-the-numbers stuff, to be sure, but it’s highlighted by a distinctive and suspense-inducing music score, a sign that Abrams and his crew are working hard to make a high-quality show.

Also interesting is the producer-creator’s decision to use a relatively unknown but talented and personable pair of performers as his leads—another smart return to the Tartikoff era and the Fox-USAN approach. Protagonists Steven and Samantha Bloom (Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) are a married couple of former CIA agents working as high-class caterers who are temporarily reinstated into the agency when their skills and knowledge are needed in order to track down a former assaociate, still in the agency, who has disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

The pair are still fairly young and attractive and are well-mannered and apparently rather well-to-do—another of the countless screen couples based on the charming Nick and Nora Charles of the Thin Man mystery film series of the 1930s and ’40s. The Blooms take on the job for patriotic reasons, to help an old friend, and to bring some spice back into their lives.

The villain, per formula, is an arms dealer and all-around bad guy named Alexander Slotsky (a Russian, as his name suggests; it will be interesting to see how long it takes Abrams et al. to introduce a Serbian villain), and the couple’s quest leads them to Madrid, Paris, and Moscow, all in the course of just a few days.

The pilot episode hits all the formula marks for this sort of series: deceptions and impersonations, unexpected setbacks, chase scenes, fisftfights, lively banter, “sexpionage,” glamorous settings, murky lighting, plenty of computer searches, the gruff boss, sinister wealthy people,  hidden agendas among the agents’ superiors, crime bosses wantonly killing underlings for minor failures, and so on.

As noted, this is all true to formula, but there’s a reason formulas happen: they work. And they work because the represent good things that work together to convey positive values. In Undercovers, the lead characters are on the good side, and their general demeanir of good cheer during their adventures demonstrates laudable character traits such as courage, perspective, optimism, loyalty, and their sincere love for each other.

The last-named sentiment is expressed very effectively in a brief scene involving a difficult moral choice on the couple’s part before the climactic action scenes. It’s also conveyed in some comical moments between the two, as they quickly express their fondness for each other and then rush off on some urgent task.

Any married couple with busy lives can appreciate those moments in this show.

In the course of the adventure, the relationship between the two lead characters undergoes some mild strains, but of course they overcome them. That’s necessary if the show is to continue. Also in accord with modern TV conventions, there is an underlying plot line which is alluded to but not explained: the Real Reason that the CIA has brought this couple back into action. One hopes that no wormholes will be involved.

Whether audiences will take to this couple and their amusing adventures over the long haul remains to be determined, but it’s clear that Abrams and his team have done their due diligence, bringing a creative flair to the formula. The placement of appealing people in spectacularly dangerous situations has long been a route to success in American popular fictions and their imitators around the world. Who knew that the creator of Lost would turn out to be a closet classicist?