Does it seem to anyone else there’s a disproportionate number of blond white women playing victims and corpses in TV crime shows? This may be partly due to TV’s disproportionate representation of white people in general, but white lead actresses frequently have hair colors other than blond. While I acknowledge I’m not going to sit down with stacks and stacks of DVDs and catalog all [...]
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tv:Mystery
It’s the classic set-up. Brian’s wife, Esther, is out of town. He meets a woman named Alice. They connect intellectually, in a way he and Esther don’t. Brian and Alice are thrown together on a case. Brian’s friend Gerry picks up on all this and comments, “Esther’s just left town, and he’s at it already!” And Alice brings him soup one day at work because [...]
I’m not sure I can speak intelligently about The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency – that’s how much I enjoyed it. It’s an HBO TV series based on the books by Alexander McCall Smith. I love it for the usual reasons: it features well-paced stories, terrific characters and beautiful settings. It also breaks a lot of film/TV industry rules that we talk about around here: [...]
New Tricks has the most enjoyable female lead I’ve ever seen in a crime drama: Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman. But there’s a secondary character – a frequently recurring guest role – who also really interests me: Esther Lane. Esther is the wife of Brian Lane, one of Sandra’s team of retired detectives. To reveal Esther, I need to tell you that Brian is a real [...]
“You shoot one bloody dog in this country!” –Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman. I love this woman. One day, Pullman is a fast-tracked British career detective whose team gets a Doberman sicced on them during a raid. She does the only sensible thing – shoot the dog – but that’s not good P.R. for the police department, which seems more focused on getting the public to [...]
When A&E produced a series based on several Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout a few years ago, one of the stories they chose was Too Many Clients. It’s a murder mystery about a deeply oversexed man (probably what we would call a sex addict these days) who is murdered in a hideously baroque, pornographic room he’s created secretly in a house in the slums [...]
In the second season episode of House, “Hunting”, Cameron has an HIV-positive patient Kalvin cough blood into her mouth and eyes. Understandably, she’s upset. Chase asks her if she wants to go for a drink and she snaps at him that a drink is not going to make the threat of HIV go away. Later, she invites Chase over and he comes, thinking she’s decided [...]
