I feel like I should just get a time-saving review template to use over the summer. “Hey, everybody! A basic-cable network is premiering a light, escapist procedural about cops and/or spies with personality quirks and gritty, but not alienatingly challenging, cases! It’s not Mad Men, but what the hey, who wants to think about stuff in the summer anyway, right? It’s just competently made, harmless fun, like [name of fondly remembered though dated show from the '80s]! Watch it, unless you already have plans, in which case don’t! You can always catch it next week! Have a great summer, bye!”
I could have gotten a lot of mileage out of that these past couple weeks, as basic-cable further ramped up its summer programming with dramas including last night’s fine-but-forgettable Rizzoli and Isles.
The TNT crime series’ forgettability extends to its name, which may be meant as a callback to titles like Cagney and Lacey but sounds like a maker of overpriced gourmet condiments and sauces. (Love their lime-cilantro marinade.) Rizzoli (Angie Harmon), is a tough, dark-minded Boston cop who chases serial killers (and, we learn, has a history as a victim). Isles (Sasha Alexander) is an eccentric medical examiner and fountain of obscure facts who is the cerebral leavening to Rizzoli’s determined toughness—established, in a bit of businesslike characterization, by having her bloody her nose playing one-on-one basketball the first time we see her.
The two friends/colleagues are, of course, a study in contrasts: Rizzoli is rough-edged and often grim, Isles is stylish and serene—which makes the show, arguably, a throwback past Cagney and Lacey, which resisted the pressure to break down along easy tomboy-and-girl lines. Harmon in particular, though, is compelling on screen and makes the most of a limited script, as do supporters and guests like Lorraine Bracco (as her mother) and Bruce McGill. It’s well-done for what it tries to be, but what it tries to be is not especially compelling.
And I could say much the same of several new offerings (not to mention returning ones), like Syfy’s Haven, A&E’s The Glades, or tonight’s Covert Affairs on USA (the network which possibly best embodies basic-cable’s Theatre of Light Competence). Which is not to say that every show is this genre is indistinguishable. Among older shows in the genre, Burn Notice’s spy capers definitely stand out, for instance, while Rizzoli is a few notches above The Glades, with its trying-too-hard-to-be quirky, wisecracking lead, or the regional-without-being-culturally-specific Memphis Beat. (No, Memphis Blues. No—I Googled it—it is in fact Memphis Beat.)
But there is a certain range these series operate in that makes them a bit review-proof. They’re rarely out-and-out awful, often owing to casting actors who deserve much better work (like Jason Lee in Memphis or Lorraine Bracco in Rizzoli) and also owing to not being ambitious enough to totally fall on their faces. But that limited range of ambition also means that there can usually only be so much upside to the shows. In fact, that may be the defining trait of the genre: the limiting of upside in exchange for safeguards on the downside. (Hawthorne, unless it’s improved a lot since I gave up on it, may be one exception.)
Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I can see having an enjoyable enough hour watching Rizzoli or even The Glades—much like Psych or or White Collar or The Closer, &c.—if I have nothing else to do. I usually have something else to do, though (and I tend to prefer reality shows for my mental veg-out TV), and the shows’ studied (and successful) familiarity often means that there’s not much intriguing to say about them.So if at any point this summer a new basic-cable procedural launches and I don’t get around to reviewing it, feel free to apply the template paragraph above. It’ll probably be close enough.
