Monsters of Television

“Geeze. Take a Midol.”

I’ve been looking forward to the premiere of Rizzoli & Isles (hereafter R&I) for a little while now. I’m a big fan of Angie Harmon (I thought she and Shaw should’ve teamed up on Chuck at the end for the season for their own villainous plans!), and while Sasha Alexander is basically known as the woman who proceeded Cote de Pablo on NCIS, she showed some skill on the show (though I never thought Kate really gelled the way Ziva has (this is not an invitation for Kate lovers to start yelling)) so I was interested to see what she would bring to this crime-solving, female power hour.

Sadly, folks, it doesn’t look good.

One of the central problems is using this episode as a launch episode. Opening with a serial killer apprentice / delving into the backstory of that and the personal connection Rizzoli has with The Surgeon is something you develop, sit on for a while. Doing it as an opening story for a novel is one thing (the show is based on a series of novels by Tess Gerritsen), where you have pages upon pages to build this up. Doing it in a single episode to launch a series is a little bit lazy, and where do your crimes go from here?

The pretty obvious answer is a serial killer of the week format, a la Criminal Minds (given that the preview for next week teases the return of the Boston strangler, this seems likely). The issue is, of course, that I can’t stand Criminal Minds, so a serial killer of the week is kind of tiring. Hopefully regular homicides occur, and we’re not seeing 3 or 4 corpses an episode.

The plot aside, R&I still doesn’t really work yet. One of the problems with procedurals is keeping things fresh, and as I’ve argued before, characters are what keep the genre fresh. R&I has the potential to have some interesting characters in its leads, but this particular episode wouldn’t let you be aware of that. Mostly, we get the set-up of Rizzoli being a super-dedicated, bad ass cop (the only female cop in sight, too) and Isles being a walking Wikipedia (“Very little is rigorously peer-reviewed,” as she notes) who has a tortoise as a pet.

It’s especially frustrating because the scenes with Rizzoli and Isles interacting really pop. Harmon and Alexander click with one another immediately, and Rizzoli is frankly a different character when around Isles. Harmon’s delivery, facial expressions, everything shifts from the “tough female cop stereotype” to the “tough female cop with a personality” when she’s interacting with Alexander, even at the crime scene where she explains why they’re leaving the body as is. The show is far more engaging when they’re together than when Rizzoli is paired with Jett Jackson or even Jack Dalton.

But perhaps the show wants to avoid the idea that Rizzoli and Isles could be a little more than partners. Harmon and Alexander seem game for a friendly sexual tension between the two characters (like Milo Ventimiglia and Adrian Pasdar seemed happy to play up the bromance between Peter and Nathan Petrelli on Heroes), but the show has wants crime procedural aspect at the forefront, allowing only brief scenes between the two leads that hint at their chemistry. If the show wants to be successful, and really differentiate itself from the other crime procedurals, ways to have Rizzoli and Isles interact beyond the ME lab are pretty much a must. Otherwise, it’s going to be a dull Criminal Minds copycat, but with more women in the cast.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• One thing I was pleased with is that Billy Burke did not turn out to be the apprentice. The show did a solid job, first in the placement of the character and then in casting, of making me think it would be.
• Could Hoyt be a little more Hannibal Lecter? Because that whole thing was WAY overplayed.
• One nice bit was Harmon’s rubbing of her hands before the reveal of what had happened to them, but nice character beats can only do so much.
• Lorraine Bracco looks horrible.