Digital Spy presents Remote Patrol - the weekly column from New York-based TV critic Bruce Fretts, taking a look at what's hot right now in US television.
Fretts is a veteran of both Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide Magazine, where he penned the wildly popular 'Cheers & Jeers' column for ten years.
Stalker and Criminal Minds: Freaks and Shrieks
CBS bills its Wednesday lineup of Criminal Minds and Stalker as "TV's scariest night". On that we agree, but not for the same reason: These shows are so bad, it's scary.
Somehow, Criminal Minds has managed to survive to see its 10th season, despite the fact that cast members keep fleeing this show like it was a bloodthirsty serial killer. Most famously, Mandy Patinkin bailed out at the start of the third season. "It was destroying my heart and my soul," he explained. "I'm very disturbed this is what people go home to. They watch horrible, misogynistic, violent activity."
Maybe that's why so many female co-stars have also split. Lola Glaudini, Paget Brewster (twice!), AJ Cook (who got fired, then brought back) and now Jeanne Tripplehorn have all left. Only Kirsten Vangsness, aka the poor man's Pauley Perrette, has remained, and now she and Cook are joined by Jennifer Love Hewitt, who made a disturbingly giddy debut as Kate Callahan, the newest member of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit.
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At this point, the show's male regulars seem to be Skyping in their performances. Matthew Gray Gubler can't even be bothered to comb his hair anymore, and Joe Mantegna, Thomas Gibson (who was revealed to have been nicknamed "Agent Vanilla" by network execs in an embarrassing recent lawsuit) and Shemar Moore spout their expository dialogue as if they're reading their lines for the first time.
Callahan's first case involved a creep (Dawson's Creek's worst actor ever, Kerr Smith) who buys severed body parts online. "It's sexual arousal related..." one of the agents tried to explain, before getting cut off by the perp's wife: "Stop, I don't need to know anymore!" You and me both, sister.
There's nothing artful about Criminal Minds' depictions of psychos, a la Hannibal. It operates like the kind of meat grinder one of its crazies might use, grinding through plotlines. "You catch an offender every week!" Callahan said incredulously. But the real criminals here are the show's writers.
Unlike CBS's other procedural franchises, CSI and NCIS, Criminal Minds hasn't been able to launch a successful spinoff. Maybe that's because they couldn't simply set it in another city, since the BAU constantly fly all over the country in their fancy plane. Despite an intriguingly bizarre cast (Forest Whitaker, Janeane Garofalo), Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior came and went quickly in 2011. But Stalker might as well be a branded spinoff since it trades on the same torture-porn tropes.
Maggie Q - who deserves better and should've taken a year off after Nikita - stars as Lt Beth Davis of the LAPD's Stalkers unit. It would seem this crime wouldn't yield enough variations to sustain one season of a network TV drama, much less ten. Then again, if Law & Order: Special Victims Unit had stuck with its original subtitle, Sex Crimes, would it still be going strong in its 16th season?
Davis herself has been a victim of stalking in the past, and she's partnered with a newcomer from the NYPD, Det Jack Larsen (Dylan McDermott), who just might be stalking his ex/baby mama (Law & Order's worst actress ever, Elisabeth Rohm). Never mind that McDermott has done this bad guy-posing-as-a-good guy routine before, on last season's CBS flop Hostages. At least Stalker will (hopefully) keep him from returning to the American Horror Story franchise for its latest incarnation, Freak Show. Which might've been a better title for Stalker, come to think of it.
This all comes from the mind of Kevin Williamson, who seems to have lost the sense of wit he showed in the original Scream movie as well as on Dawson's Creep…er, Creek. Now he specialises in humourless exercises in sadism like The Following and Stalker. And that's a shame, because such a criminally clever mind is a terrible thing to waste.
