MARY Shannon, the lead character of USA’s new show, “In Plain Sight,” is clearly the busiest US Marshall – not to mention human being – in the entire free world. But, hey, it takes a multi-tasker to handle a job like hers.
This new cop show revolves around an undercover marshall who relocates people in the witness protection program. Those witnesses are either PC/against-stereotype ethnics (American Indians with Stanford educations and children in private school) or shameless stereotypes or caricatures of entire ethnic groups (Italian-American gangsters who are ignorant half-wits in bad clothes).
But back to busy Mary. The overly-long 76-minute premiere opens with a gangster named Frank Santora, who takes time out from a pleasant family drive to kill a 500-pound mafia rival, a là “The Sopranos” (they wish).
Things go awry and dead fatty falls out of the window and lands on Frankie’s family’s car hood.
Quick cut to Mary driving in the desert (it takes place in New Mexico) with her partner (Frederick Weller) who serves merely as a foil for her constant wise-cracking. (The entire script is wisecracks.)
In the premiere, Mary solves a murder in one day during which she also must 1.) pick up a Ukrainian witness for relocation, 2.) stop by a grisly teen murder scene involving Frankie’s son (the Ukrainian is still in the back seat!), 3.) stop by the morgue, 4.) stop grief-stricken people from throwing the bodies around, 5.) go to the local homicide bureau where she smart-mouths another detective, 6.) walk into a biker bar men’s room and cripple a guy by hurling a bar of soap at warp speed into his private parts.
Then she must 7.) pick up her partner again, 8.) find and physically assault other suspects, 9.) stop home, fight with her mother (Leslie Ann Warren) and sister (Nichole Hiltz, 10), find time to beat up and secure other Mafia types, 11.) stop Frankie’s wife from killing him, 12.) visit and interrogate the rich land developer and his son, 13.) drive to Albuquerque to find another suspect at a resort, 14.) drive back and to have sex with her lover (Cristián de la Fuente), 15.) stop a kid from hanging himself, 16.) go to her surprise birthday party, 17.) leave and have the entire police force follow her to arrest the real killer, 18.) stop back home again only to remember that she forgot to shop for the Ukranian witness, 19.) go back out and deliver a bag of groceries.
And you thought you were busy!
It’s all a bit ridiculous and the writing is scary, although the stars are first rate and the locales are pretty good too.