“Memphis Homicide
Squad”
Tonight at 10 on Court TV
½
LAST year Court TV debuted “Brooklyn North Homicide Squad,” and billed it as the real New York cop show – kind of “NYPD Blue” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” combined. And it was, and it did well.
Not to let a good thing, er, die, the suits-that-be decided to try it again – but in a place as different from NYC geographically and socially as possible – while still keeping it big city gritty. They came up with Memphis, the only city in the world, probably, with an Elvis memorial statue in a town square.
The show, which starts tomorrow night and runs for three consecutive nights, “Memphis Homicide Squad,” is a good break in a TV week that is so boring it might drive people back to books.
At times riveting and at times snore-inducing, “Memphis Homicide Squad” is just grunt work, lots of pounding the like real police work. Lots of streets, and lots of dirty work – without one lousy detective looking like an out of work model. In fact, these folks don’t even look like detectives – they look like managers at K-Mart, and housewives. But they are real detectives – and good ones.
For the next three nights you’ll follow a group of 18 investigators whose job it is to solve the 150 or so murders in this deadly Bible Belt city every year. Praise the Lord and pass the ammo.
In part one, the detectives are called to investigate the possible homicide of a man found next to the dumpster, and later that night, the case of a man who’s found shot in his car and a separate set of detectives who are put on the case.
During the next two nights, they’ll investigate and solve not only those cases, but also the murders of a three-year-old boy, a young man who was murdered while riding his bicycle in a housing project, and a murder/car jacking.
Interspersed into the day-to-day cop work, are glimpses into the home lives of the detectives – and how they try to have normal lives outside of the “office.”
Some of it is very good, some very depressing. What some of it isn’t is very exciting. I know this sounds weird at best and sociopathic at worse, but after the first murder it kind of becomes routine.
Most intriguing in the show are two female detectives, Sgt. Queen McMahon and Sgt. Vennes Owens who manage to mix compassion, disgust and warmth when dealing with the worse perps imaginable. And oddly enough, they don’t look like models either.