The detective shows featuring heroic male crimefighters that were popular in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s have almost disappeared. The series most similar today is Tracker, where Justin Hartley and Jensen Ackles take up the leading-man roles once filled by Rock Hudson and James Garner, playing hunky brothers who solve crimes whose victims’ families offer substantial awards. Tracker just began its second season on Paramount/CBS, and the brothers have “tracked” missing persons who’ve gone missing because they came across government black ops.
There are a number of detective shows currently featuring divining women who solve crimes: Matlock (Kathy Bates), High Potential (Kaitlin Olson), Elsbeth (Carre Preston), Grotesquerie (Niecy Nash). Curiously, the show that grinds the fewest gears on color, sexuality, and other such political fads is Grotesqueries, starring Nash, an actress who’s black and lesbian, created by gay writer/director Ryan Murphy.
All are in their first seasons, save Elsbeth. Carrie Preston, previously best-known as a backwoods Louisiana waitress in HBO’s True Blood, has given up vampires and swamps for corrupt officials and Manhattan. A Chicago lawyer, she appears to have been plucked by the NYPD to satisfy a consent decree that their activities be observed by an outsider, to see if they’re roughing up suspects and violating civil rights. She’s also a plant from the Department of Justice observing whether the chief of police, DAs, etc. are corrupt. The formula for each episode is basic Columbo. We see the murder (or manslaughter) planned and happening, and then kooky Elsbeth, wearing garish, overly-colorful outfits, keeps popping up and asking the culprit nagging questions until he or she almost begs to be arrested. Elsbeth was created by the husband/wife team of Michelle and Robert King, who created the popular series Evil, which was a kind of detective show in which a psychologist, priest, and scientist investigated allegedly occult phenomena.
Grotesquerie at first seems like Ryan Murphy’s attempt to sell a series that cashes in on the occult fascinations of the audience disappointed by the ending of Evil, much as his new show Doctor Odyssey seems is his revamp of Love Boat. Niecy Nash plays a chief homicide detective hunting a serial killer who makes sculptural displays of the dismembered and remixed body parts of his victims, including killing families around a dinner table while boiling their infant in a pot on the stove. She has a philosophy professor husband in a coma, and a very fat daughter trying to gain more weight to qualify for a reality TV show for the morbidly obese. Like all Murphy shows there’s constant sex, the kinkier the better: a young hot priest wearing assless chaps as he walks among the pews in an empty church; a nursing home orderly who screws both a mother and daughter; a head nurse who pleasures herself with the digits of one of her comatose patients. It’s not clear when we’ll know what’s real and what’s a coma patient’s dream.
High Potential is a remake of a French drama of basically the same name. A downwardly mobile, working-class single mom working as an office cleaner solves a crime and is hired by the LAPD when they realize she has a photographic memory and a 160 IQ. Kaitlan Olson is the closest of this bunch to a Poirot or Marple, out-thinking those around her, though she’s younger and potentially she and the detectives could become romantically involved. In a world where Elon Musk and other intelligent people are creating new vehicles, rocket launchers and internet systems, we’re expected to believe that her inability to focus her volcanic intelligence kept her from any previous career success.
Matlock has no connection to the show starring the late Andy Griffith. A possibly Ozempic-ed Kathy Bates plays a lawyer in her 70s who’s returning to work after 30 years, supposedly because a bad marriage left her destitute and without a retirement fund. Like Carrie Preston in Elsbeth she’s something else, in her case a wealthy lady with a good marriage raising a grandson with her husband, because her daughter died of opioid use. “Matlock” is the last name she finds amusing to use for her fake personae, backed up by the fabricated records her internet-savvy grandson creates. The firm is run by Beau Bridges and his son Jason Ritter (the only other white actors playing lawyers) and it’s implicated in Bates’ daughter’s death. Like Elspeth she’s playing a part and all the subplots of particular cases fit within a grander scheme, sometimes creating a tension between the need to bring justice to the individual cases and finding out what Elsbeth or Matlock need for their grander goal.
Matlock isn’t awful but it does, more than any of the other shows, preach about race. None of these shows have any complicated realism, where someone uses their victim status as an illegal immigrant, gay, woman, or person of color, to get away with a crime, to silence someone, to destroy someone’s career or further their own. I’d like to see some script writers, show runners, or directors with the balls to tackle those stories.
