TV Detectives 101: "And then a case walked
through the door…."
At
their most basic, detective stories are about questions that need answering,
whether they be "Is my husband sleeping around?" or "Who killed that guy?" No
matter how often the mystery genre gets run through the filters of modernism,
postmodernism, naturalism, expressionism, parody, or what-have-you, the stories
work best if the hero or heroine has a job to do. In fact, over the decades,
the most popular detective shows have often kept extraneous character detail to
a minimum, instead focusing on how diligent folks solve impossible riddles.
(After all, there's no expiration date on a jigsaw puzzle.)
One of the first and longest-running TV detective
shows was Dragnet, which made the jump from radio to television in 1951, then
ran for eight full seasons in the '50s before leaving the air, only to return
thrice more: once in the late '60s in a version featuring original
star-producer-director Jack Webb, and then again for short revamps in the late
'80s and early '00s. By the time Dragnet debuted on the radio in 1949, the first
flower of film noir—heavily informed by the pungent pulp fiction of the
likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain—was stating
to wilt, and gritty crime-stories were moving toward the new trend of
docu-realism. Dragnet was docu-realist to the point of absurdity. At the start of
an episode, Detective Joe Friday (played by Webb) would state the time and the
place where the action was taking place, then walk the audience through a
single crime (or series of unrelated crimes), emphasizing the routine legwork
through which he and his partner cracked cases. Webb was a moralist, and in the
'60s version of Dragnet especially, he often used the show as a platform from which
to preach the gospel of law and order. But he kept the foundation of the show
simple: crime, clues, apprehension, justice.
The procedural model Dragnet popularized on TV has
proved profitable to countless writers and producers, even when they aren't
telling stories about cops. The Perry Mason series—which began
in novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, then was adapted for the movies in the '30s
and the radio in the '40s before finding a home on TV in 1957—follows a
defense attorney who perpetually frees the innocent by figuring out who the real criminals are, then
breaking them down on the witness stand in what starts as a routine
cross-examination. As portrayed by Raymond Burr on TV, Mason has a broad streak
of kindness mixed with arrogance, and the development of his
personality—along with his interaction with his secretary and private
investigator—helped establish the model for the character-based detective
series that became more popular in the '70s. (Not to mention inspiring the
long-running Matlock, which is essentially a Dixie-fried, geriatric Perry Mason.) But the Perry Mason TV series was still
rigidly formulaic, right down to the flustered D.A. undone week after week by
Mason's keen eye for detail and flair for courtroom theatrics.
In fact, the Perry Mason formula is so sound that
it enabled the procedural mystery to move outside the realm of cops and
lawyers. The title character of the '70s series Quincy, M.E. does work for the state
and assists the police, but he isn't, strictly speaking, an agent of law
enforcement. He's an L.A. County medical examiner who suspects foul play is
involved with seemingly every corpse that wheels into his morgue. Through his
medical skills and general nosiness, Quincy (played by the inimitable Jack
Klugman) sniffs out murderers and draws attention to social problems, from
anorexia to the scourge of punk rock, even if it gets him in trouble with his
superiors. Take away the social consciousness (and the murder), and the spirit
of Quincy
lives on in the current hit House, a Sherlock Holmes-inspired mystery series in
which the "detective" is a diagnostician and the "criminals" are rare diseases
and viruses—and, of course, the patients who lie about how they picked up
these bugs in the first place.
In a practical, show-business sense, House also draws its
inspiration from the popularity of CSI, itself a sort of flashier version of Quincy, albeit one in which the
forensic scientists know in advance that their corpses are murder victims. And CSI—along with the
half-dozen other case-heavy, character-light procedurals that have aired on CBS
in the '00s—owes a lot of its existence to the Law & Order family. When the original Law & Order
debuted on NBC in 1990, it was something of an afterthought show, lacking
big-name stars or glamorous subject matter. What it had was a gimmick: the
first half of each episode was dedicated to two cops tracking down a murderer;
the second half was about the D.A. office putting that killer away. It was half Dragnet,
half Perry Mason
(albeit on the side of the prosecution), with a touch of Quincy in the way the show
considered hot-button subjects "ripped from today's headlines." And while those
hot-button subjects may look dated in re-runs, the cases themselves—and
how they get cracked—have proven timeless.
In fact, the success of Law & Order in near-constant repeats
on TNT convinced the cable channel to generate some original programming in a L&O; vein. The result was The
Closer,
basic-cable's most-watched original series of all time as of fall 2008.
Returning to the diverse Los Angeles that Dragnet once mapped out so well, The
Closer
follows a driven detective from Atlanta (played with a too-honeyed accent by
Kyra Sedgwick) as she leads a group of veteran cops in investigations of "priority
homicides": murders likely to draw a lot of media attention, and that therefore
need to be closed quickly. The Closer is more interested in the personal life of its
heroine than most modern procedurals—in that way, it's more like the
character-driven detective shows in the "intermediate" category below—but
it isn't exactly continuity-heavy. As with all the other shows on this 101
list, The Closer
keeps its strength in its reliable formula: A body turns up, along with the job
of finding who's responsible.
Intermediate:
"As for me, my name is…"
While film noir was transforming into
docu-realism, some producers were trying to hold fast to the hard-boiled
private-eye tradition that pre-dated and partially molded noir, while also
trying to update it for the jet-fueled '50s. Writer Blake Edwards concocted the
breezy gumshoe Richard Diamond for radio (and later TV), then in 1959 whipped
up Peter Gunn, a stylish show about a quasi-Beatnik dick with a thing for
jazz and copious connections in the demimonde. Though it was beaten to the air
by the equally swingin' 77 Sunset Strip (and shadowed by 77's spin-offs, including Hawaiian
Eye and Surfside
6), Peter
Gunn's
exact mix of expressionistic style and careful character development planted a
seed that would start to blossom more than a decade later, leading to a thicket
of detective shows in which the people mattered more than the procedure.
[pagebreak]
Another major progenitor to what would become the
golden age of TV detectives was Mannix, a super-snazzy PI series
co-created by two of the genre's leading lights, Richard Levinson and William
Link. Mike Connors starred as a strong-arm type who preferred to use his
instincts rather than modern crime-solving techniques. As a result, his stories
staggered two-fisted action with a lot of chatter, as Mannix made an effort to
get to know the people he was investigating. Mannix debuted in 1967, the same
year as Ironside,
another series about an old-school detective (played by Perry Mason's Raymond Burr)
navigating a modernizing world. Both lionized the fuddy-duddy, but both also
embraced the visual flair of '60s cinema, using askew camera angles,
split-screens, and jarring close-ups to establish just how strange the
landscape was becoming for a couple of square-jawed men of action.
A year after midwifing Mannix, Levinson and Link
brought back to TV a character they'd first introduced in an episode of a 1960
anthology series, then reintroduced in a stage play. His name was Lieutenant
Columbo (no official first name), and after appearing in a pair of TV movies,
he moved on to become the staple of The NBC Mystery Movie from 1971 to 1978. Columbo had a different format
and feel than anything else on TV at the time, starting with its star Peter
Falk, a slumpy, mumbly type beholden to the John Cassavetes school of
hyper-realist acting. Columbo also had a keen gimmick: each mystery began with
a murderer planning out and executing a seemingly perfect crime—something
which often took up more than a third of an episode. Then, instead of having to
figure out the who, what, why, where or how, the audience tried to figure out
the one mistake the killer made that Lt. Columbo would eventually smoke out.
The Columbo
plots were ingenious, but even more intriguing was the character of Columbo
himself, with his rumpled trenchcoat and cluelessly irritating demeanor.
Following the lead of Columbo and the rest of the original NBC Mystery Movie lineup (McCloud and McMillan And Wife), the '70s were soon
awash in series named for their crime-solving heroes: Banacek, Kojak, Madigan, Cannon, Baretta, Quincy (itself part of the NBC
Mystery Movie
team at one point), and Columbo's chief rival for superior character-driven
detective action: The Rockford Files.
The peak era for TV detectives stretched from 1971
to well into the '80s—long enough for subgenres to spring up. In 1984,
the team of Levinson and Link created the TV equivalent of the "cozy" mystery
in Murder, She Wrote, a long-running series about a personable old writer with
keen sleuthing skills. But Levinson and Link actually created a superior "cozy"
a decade earlier in Ellery Queen, starring Jim Hutton as the famous
literary detective, who each week walked viewers through the clues in a "locked
room" mystery and emerged at the end with a clever solution to a
troubling—but not too troubling—conundrum. Ellery Queen only ran for one season,
but the fact that the episodes still show up on cable from time to time shows
how much it's beloved by mystery buffs.
The '80s saw a brief run of detective series with
dual leads—one male, one female—drawing on the romantic tension and
quick wit of Dashiell Hammett's classic Thin Man series. The first
breakout hit in the genre was Remington Steele, which starred Stephanie
Zimbalist as a private detective who combated the sexism of potential clients
by renting the services of con man Pierce Brosnan as the frontman for her
practice. As with the best character-driven mystery shows, the cases on Remington
Steele
helped define both the protagonists and the times they lived in, puckishly
examining how romance and gender roles played out in an age of
second-generation feminism.
And for those who weren't as keen on the love
stuff, the '80s also saw a revival of Mannix-style "manly man"
detective shows, the best of which may have been Spenser For Hire, starring Robert Urich
(also the star of the superb '70s detective series Vega$) as the erudite, deeply
moral PI originated in a series of novels by Robert B. Parker. Unlike a lot of
the tough-guy shows of the '80s—Simon & Simon, Jake And The Fatman, Magnum P.I., etc.—Spenser
For Hire
was more in the classic pulp tradition, rich with detail about its Boston
setting and its iconoclastic hero. It's worth noting that fans of Parker's
novels aren't always so kind to the TV version, which they consider simplistic,
but compared to the other detective shows on the air in the waning days of The
Golden Age, Spenser is a throwback to the time when location and character
mattered as much as cases.
After lying dormant for much of the '90s (aside
from the proliferation of "cozies" like Diagnois: Murder and The Cosby
Mysteries),
the old-school detective series made a comeback in the '00s with Veronica
Mars,
a show about a razor-sharp teenager (played by fanboy favorite Kristen Bell)
who helps run her dad's PI business and uses her connections to help her
classmates solve fairly mundane mysteries. Though episodic and procedural to a
significant extent, Veronica Mars also featured larger mysteries that took multiple
episodes—or even full seasons—for the heroine to solve. It also
made good use of its southern California setting, using Veronica's status as a
working-class outcast at her ritzy school to set up an extended study of class
identity in the 21st century. Though the show's title and its emphasis on a
savvy lead character recall the detective series' '70s peak, Veronica Mars' ambition and thematic
complexity make it just as much like the sophisticated shows in the section
below.
Advanced:
"This is the city…"
If Dragnet represented film noir re-imagined as a
procedural, and Peter Gunn turned noir into a character study, then M
Squad
is the '50s detective series that picked up on what noir had to say about the
inevitable corruption of social institutions. For three years—from 1957
to 1960—Lee Marvin played a no-nonsense plainclothes cop assigned to
crack cases with a special unit designed to fit each theft and murder in the
city into a larger pattern of organized crime, one that reached from the low-level
pickpockets to the fat-cat politicians. As cynical as it was stylish, M
Squad was
the precursor to the holy trinity of "policier as social study" shows: Hill
Street Blues, NYPD Blue
and The Wire.
As far as those social-study cop shows go, nothing
tops The Wire—and
probably nothing ever will—but it's unlikely that series would've
happened without Homicide: Life On The Street proving that it was
possible to win devotees and eke years and years of stories out of a
fundamentally bleak examination of an off-market U.S. city—the same city
in both series, Baltimore—populated by diverse, stubbornly self-centered
characters. Homicide qualifies for this list over The Wire (or Hill Street Blues or NYPD Blue, for that matter) because
for all its doggedly realistic portrayals of the toll police-work takes on the
men and women who do it, Homicide still clung to the well-worn TV-mystery format. A
body is found, the unit gets a call, and the chase is on. Only in Homicide, the cops had to struggle
with the lack of hard evidence and the difficulty of getting a
confession—as well as the sick uncertainty over whether they were really
making any kind of difference in the long-term health of their decaying
metropolis.
[pagebreak]
While the American TV detective remained
relatively simplistic prior to the debut of Homicide, British television often
hewed closer to the genre's literary origins, producing intricately plotted
mysteries with vivid dialogue and an implicit understanding that even justice
can be unfair. The crown jewel of the British TV detective series has to be Prime
Suspect,
a string of multi-part TV movies starring Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, a
troubled inspector battling bigotry and her own human weaknesses while trying
to right some appalling wrongs. Unflinching in its depiction of the underworld
and unsparing in its characterization of the hard-drinking, often erratic
Tennison, Prime Suspect pre-dated Homicide in showing how studying the criminal mind tends
to warp the students, and it touched off a wave of grimy British crime sagas
with similarly shifty protagonists. (Most notably Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane
as a wreck of a man who can easily see into the hearts and minds of crooks. In
the clip below, Coltrane and Mirren spoof their most famous characters for
Comic Relief.)
Red Herrings
The intense seriousness of detective series has
made them ripe for parody—most recently on the underrated 2007 sitcom Andy
Barker P.I.,
in which a schlubby accountant accidentally inherits a retired detective's
cases and gets drawn into a world in which the mundane clashes with the pulpy. Andy
Barker P.I.
only lasted six episodes, matching the number of episodes of the greatest
policier parody of all time: Police Squad! Freely riffing on the Dragnet, M Squad, and '70s detective-show
paradigms, Police Squad! may have been too straight-faced and surreal for TV audiences
in 1982, though the premise scored on the big screen with the Naked Gun series. Maybe that's
because by the end of the '80s, the kind of shows the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker
team mocked were falling out of favor, which made people more open to the idea
of ripping them apart.
In the years between Police Squad! and The Naked Gun, Moonlighting spoofed detective
conventions with greater commercial success, taking the Remington Steele formula of
steely-businesswoman-requires-aid-of-irressponsible-but- attractive-man and
gently ridiculing it by adding preposterous mysteries and snarky
self-reference. The problem? Audiences enjoyed the playful tone of the series,
but also genuinely cared about the relationship between the rakish Bruce Willis
and the chilly Cybill Shepherd, which made it difficult for the show to
maintain its aloofness. Also, the personality clashes between the castmates and
the length of time it took to bang out their witty banter led to interminable
production delays, costing Moonlighting its chance to become an all-time classic instead
of just a nobly over-ambitious curio.
And speaking of nobly over-ambitious curios, in
1990, oddball arthouse filmmaker David Lynch tackled the TV mystery format with Twin Peaks,
an alternately brilliant and frustrating show that used an investigation into
the murder of a small-town beauty to reveal the perverse secret lives and
unconscious desires of a whole community. Wonderfully weird and ultimately
unsatisfying, Twin Peaks is also noteworthy for introducing the most charmingly odd TV
detective since Columbo: Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan),
an upbeat, philosophical crime-fighter with a weakness for coffee and pie and a
"good scout" demeanor not unlike Lynch's.
Finally, when it comes to the often-dull reality
of detective work, no TV series has done more to demystify the job than COPS, a show in which solving
crimes is often a matter of listening to two drunk people deliver incomprehensible
personal narratives, then deciding which one is less annoying. It isn't as neat
as Dragnet
or as sleek as Peter Gunn, but COPS made TV audiences so aware of real police
lingo and attitudes that it makes amped-up, cartoonish detective shows a little
harder to take seriously. Goodbye noir; hello vérité.
TOP 5
1. Columbo
It may not be the most thematically deep detective
series ever aired, but Columbo has been reliably entertaining for going on 50
years now, offering mysteries based on unexpected minutiae, along with the
iconic clash between too-clever snobs and the working-class drudge who always
outlasts them.
2. Homicide: Life On The Street
The Wire is the most profound cop show of all time, but Homicide is the most profound mystery-based cop show, dealing with
all the bureaucratic rot and existential futility that The Wire did, but through the
prism of the detective series building-block: the case.
3. Law & Order
The formula has long been diluted by spin-offs,
rip-offs, and repeats, but there's no greater testament to the enduring quality
of Law & Order
than this: when a channel-surfer lands on an episode of L&O;, it's hard not to keep
watching all the way through to the final chung-chung.
4. Veronica Mars
Weak ratings and a creatively confused third
season killed one of the decade's best series—detective or
otherwise—before its time, but the two season-length mysteries Veronica
Mars
presented before its downfall stand among TV's finest, both in terms of their
narrative twists and the way they mapped out the mood of their times.
5. Prime Suspect
The polar opposite of the "cozy" mystery is the
hard-boiled one, and TV detective series don't get much harder than this
British import, which sees crime as a continuum, with all of its
characters—including its heroine—spread out across the line.