USA Network's superior crime shows really do live by that slogan "Characters Welcome"

"When Mary Met Marshall": In last week's episode of USA Network's In Plain Sight, we witnessed the less-than-magical first meeting in 2003 of present-day WITSEC colleagues Marshall Mann (Frederick Weller) and sarcastic, generally misanthropic Mary Shannon (Mary McCormack).

"This week sees the season premieres of USA's Law & Order: Criminal Intent (yesterday's debut, introducing a new detective played by Saffron Burrows, marked the beginning of season 9) and In Plain Sight (starting its third season today). Both series feature USA doing what it does best: offering quirky crimefighters who nail bad guys even as their own lives are falling apart."

-- Gary Susman, in a March 31 AOL "Inside TV" post,

"How USA Network Found Its Groove"

by Ken

Meanwhile, tonight Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio joins the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent as the Major Case Squad's new captain, as the show moves toward completion of a near-total cast turnover since the show migrated from NBC to USA Network last season. One of the perceptive points Gary Susman makes in the above-referenced post, written for the season premieres of L&O: CI (now Tuesday nights at 10pm ET) and In Plain Sight (now Wednesday nights at 10pm) is that even this fugitive from Dick Wolf's Law & Order plant, which seems not to fit the mold of the USA-created shows he's writing about, was nudged closer with the introduction of the quirky Jeff Goldblum as one of the male detectives -- not surprisingly, a quirky detective.

We're two episodes into those new seasons of Law & Order: Criminal Intent (Tuesdays at 10pm ET/PT) and In Plain Sight (Wednesdays at 10pm ET/PT) on USA Network, and they're both going swimmingly. In Plain Sight, created by David Maples, is coming off perhaps its most memorable episode, telling in parallel a troubled couple's 2003 entry into the witness-protection program and its present-day crisis, the point of fascination being that the first encounter between Mary and Marshall and their extremely uneasy first collaboration. It was, I think, everything we fans of these outstanding characters might have hoped for.

I've been wanting to write about the USA series, which now include Psych, Burn Notice, Royal Pains, and White Collar as well, but it's not easy to describe what's so good about them except that they're built around really memorable and audience-involving characters and that they're really well written and acted. And that seems so obvious as to be hardly worth saying.

Which may be why I have trouble letting go of Gary Susman's piece. He seems to think it's easy to explain the USA series. The network, he says, has a formula

The network's quirky crimefighter formula goes back to Monk, which debuted in 2002. (Actually, it goes back even further, to NBC's Columbo, in which Peter Falk's rumpled gumshoe could barely keep his trenchcoat clean or his jalopy running but managed nonetheless to trip up murderers with his disarming manner and his annoying attention to detail.) With Adrian Monk, played to Emmy-winning perfection by Tony Shalhoub, USA had a sleuth whose obsessive-compulsive disorder made him nearly impossible to get along with but also made him a brilliantly deductive detective. It also made him very funny. The juxtaposition of Monk's meticulous pursuit of criminals with his shambles of a private life made the show a pioneering comedy, one that satisfied mystery lovers while reassuring viewers that each week's menace was low-stakes enough that they didn't have to worry too much about the characters' fates. It was crime-caper comfort food, and it provided USA with a hit that gave the long-faceless network an identifiable brand. The series finale, in December 2009, drew 9.4 million viewers, setting a record as the most-watched episode of a scripted cable series.

The basic description of Monk, created by Andy Breckman, is terrific, including the hark-back to Peter Falk's justly celebrated Columbo. What's objectionable to the point of being nonsensical is the notion that there is any kind of "formula" at work here. You would think that an observer as canny as Susman shows himself would hear the alarm bells going off with the Columbo reference. If there were indeed a formula at work here, you would expect to have found Columbo not only widely but successfully imitated.

In fact, about the only instance that pops to mind is Murder, She Wrote and Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher. By astonishing coincidence, Murder, She Wrote was created by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link in collaboration with Peter S. Fischer, and the "formula" consisted of a memorable central character and audience-involving supporting ones, with many, many seasons' worth of solid casting and writing. (For extra credit, list the shows that have successfully copied the Murder, She Wrote "formula.")

The fact is that much of what Susman claims is part and parcel of the Monk "formula" isn't true of some or all of the other USA shows. I can see, for example, how Monk could be considered "crime-caper comfort food," which "satisfied mystery lovers while reassuring viewers that each week's menace was low-stakes enough that they didn't have to worry too much about the characters' fates." But first off, of what TV crime series is this not true? It's one of those facts of life of series TV. The regular cast members are safe unless one is being written out of the show, in which case there's apt to have been so much advance publicity that it still comes as not much of a surprise. And this is as true of, say, the dreadful CSI shows as of anything on USA.

(So why are so many people watching the CSI crapfests? Perhaps CBS has a vast network of field operatives paying people to watch, or at least claim to watch, them? Or perhaps, with those tiresome plots cloaked in all that technical mumbo-jumbo, they've found a hitherto untapped audience of folks whose only available entertainment alternative is staring at a blank wall?)

Surprisingly, although Susman takes ample note of the fact that Monk was a comedy, and a very funny one, it doesn't seem to occur to him to stress this as USA's "formula." The network has chosen to make its crime-caper series funny. It was one of the things that popped out of the pilot of Burn Notice, created by Matt Nix and starring Jeffrey Donovan as Michael Westen, a CIA agent who has inexplicably been "burned" -- dismissed and abandoned in Miami. The show is hilarious, not least for Michael's brilliantly ingenious narration, and also for the remarkable supporting cast -- we'll talk more about this before the new season begins, in June.

The notion of "formula" says that these shows are something anyone could do, by simply popping interchangeable elements into the formulaic pattern. To me, this triumphantly misses the entire point of what the USA shows have done, which is to create memorable characters, which obviously means hiring really good actors, and writing well for them.

"USA's slogan was 'Characters Welcome,'" Susman writes, "but it soon became clear that all the new lead characters were going to be variations on Adrian Monk." I'm thinking that in his determination to "gotcha" USA, to ferret out hidden truths, he's overlooked the obvious. What USA does so well is to live by that slogan: "Characters Welcome." TV, after all, is basically a character-driven medium. The "Characters Welcome" thing is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do well, and a quite extraordinary thing when it's done well.

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