I don’t know if we can blame The Mentalist or The Closer or House or Monk, or whether we can trace the causes much, much farther back in history, but we are presently up to our occipital lobes in eccentric doctors/inverstigators who annoy their colleagues with their quirks yet get the job done. At this point, I’m longing for a show about a detective who has no personal quirks and quietly does his or her job, while getting along with coworkers, always bringing in everyone’s favorite dish on Pot Luck Lunch Thursdays.
Instead, enter Dr. Megan Hunt (Dana Delany), the medical examiner on ABC’s Body of Proof, which debuted last night. She’s a quirky doctor and a quirky detective! Neurosurgeon Hunt had to change careers after an accident, cracks wise and rubs the sticklers around her the wrong way. And she explains, about four minutes into the pilot, pretty much the way we can expect every episode of the series to work for as long as it runs: “The body is the proof. It will tell you everything you need to know, if you just have the patience to look.”
I love Delany, and her charm in this role is not lost on me, but that affection (nor mine for The Wire’s Sonja Sohn) is not enough to keep me coming back. But did any of you see something in the body of Body of Proof that I just didn’t have the patience to look for?