They Just Don’t Make ’Em Like They Used to

As probably everyone except those the three Martians just now touching down in Schenectady knows, I was a huge fans of TV crime series during the 1970s and ’80s--my teenage years. Those were the days when private-eye and cop shows were as much a plague on the U.S. networks as forensic-investigation and lawyer series are today. And I couldn’t have been happier. But there hasn’t been a good, straightforward, adult P.I. show on the air since the late 1990s (although the 2005 Tim Daly series, Eyes, showed some promise), and Law & Order: Criminal Intent and the HBO’s The Wire are the only decent police programs still being broadcast, now that NYPD Blue is no longer.

However, it seems that the nets--burned by too many “reality-TV” series and poor Lost imitators--are suddenly rediscovering gumshoes and flatfeet, a decade or more after critics declared that viewers could take no more of them. Browsing through TV Squad’s recent reports on what we have to look forward to next fall (see here, here, and here), one would think that it was 1975 again. So many cop and P.I. shows (especially on CBS), so precious little time we’ll probably be allowed to bond with any of them before the axes start to fall. If our luck holds, several of these won’t make it past the pilot stage. But there might be hope for a handful. Or fewer.

Here are some of the P.I. and cop shows in the works (most quoted comments courtesy of TV Squad):

• Amber Valleta is set to star in a CBS drama pilot called Twilight, “about a private investigator who is also a vampire.” (Sounds like somebody’s been cribbing from Charlie Huston’s Joe Pitt series).

• Stephen Dorff headlines the CBS drama pilot Skip Tracer, “about a detective who finds people who try to disappear. Beverly D’Angelo will play his mother, who is in prison for killing her husband.”

• Hip-hop rapper and actor LL Cool J (shown above) has been signed to star in CBS’ The Man, from CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker. “LL will play an undercover cop who deals with busting perps and running stings at night, and then works to raise his three adopted children by day. The formula is to have the crime stories as the weekly feature while the home life is serialized and takes place in longer arcs throughout the season.”

• Eric Balfour, who’s probably most familiar from his 24 role as CTU analyst Milo Pressman (but is also memorable from Six Feet Under) has been signed to star in a CBS cop drama titled Protect and Serve, set in suburban Los Angeles.

• Women’s Murder Club, based on a novel by James Patterson, is about “a homicide detective, a medical examiner, a newspaper reporter, and a young assistant district attorney [who] work together to solve homicide investigations,” according to the Internet Movie Database. If this ABC project is picked up, it will mean the return to television of Angie Harmon (formerly of Law & Order), playing detective Lindsey Boxer.

• Ray Stevenson, who’s been playing Titus Pullo on the excellent HBO series Rome, will take a flyer on Babylon Fields (also on CBS), playing a detective in a town where “the dead return to earth in an attempt to restore old wounds.”

• FOX’s K-Ville is “about cops living and working in post-Katrina New Orleans. It’s one of four Katrina-related projects that were being pitched to networks for the next television season, but it’s the only one that is moving forward. K-Ville is an hour-long drama that tells the stories of the police officers who stayed behind when the hurricane hit.” Cole Hauser (ER) is reportedly one of the stars here.

• And then, of course, there’s Marlowe, the ABC series we’ve written about in this space before, and which will likely star Irishman Jason O’Mara as a modernized version of Raymond Chandler’s iconic private dick, Philip Marlowe. I want to like this show, really I do. But trying to update a character who is so beloved and familiar is destined to piss off fans ... and only confuse those benighted folk who have someone avoided being exposed to Chandler’s P.I. in the past. I smell another Night Stalker.