Detectives: Gone Without a Trace

I kind of like Anthony LaPaglia. I happened to see an episode of his new show recently. It was hysterical. First of all, his voice is over the top silly. I kept thinking I was watching Mighty Mouse; his gruff, whispery kind of gangster talk is clearly an attempt to make a cop figure sympathetic by making him seem like, well, a Godfather. How fucking sick is that? What was most hilarious (and disturbing) about the show, however, was that there is no 'detection' to speak of (making it closer to reality than most shows). But this one is positioned, not in the Twilight Zone, but in the 1984 zone: the whole process of busting people revolved around marshalling the tremendous surveillance assets. At every turn, as they are getting more suspicious, a new piece of information turns up, but it's not something the police had to figure out. It's an ATM charge or a surveillance camera. Which makes the tough guy nonsense at the center of the show all the more laughable. Used to be the cops would just stay at the station and wait for someone to solve the crime for them (and if that doesn't pan out, pick a weak second and force a confession). Now, they can just poke into every aspect of the person's life until they find something. Why don't the writers do an episode where the cops turn people's lives upside down and then it turns out they had the wrong guy? While they are still following the Arthurian model, that would spoil the show. Leave that to the reality shows (which are much better anyway).

Now all that said, the other side of this situation is equally absurd. The current missing persons case where the husband was out buying a mattress 20m before calling 911 is laughably stupid and insane. Having access to information that can bust a case is not a bad thing. Mixing it with the old detective archetypes is totally silly. The new detectives are researchers. Of course, the other reality of this is that in the past, there were plenty of ways to dig up more evidence, and good cops did that, but lazy ones made up their minds right away and went into the mode of just beating on their chosen target until they could get a confession. In one piece I saw earlier this year, a kid was totally railroaded and went to jail for 17 years, only to be exonerated later. He had confessed. On the show, they said in cases where someone is exonerated, one third of the people had confessed!!