Word: whodunit
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More than a crime writer or social dramatist, Simon is a poet of beautiful losers. He has an unfailing ear for dialogue (getting a hard-to-solve case is "catching a stone whodunit"), and he's abetted by the subtle performances of regulars like Sonja Sohn and Wendell Pierce. Even crooked union boss Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer) is more pitiable than loathsome--he's a dinosaur and knows it--and his underlings are the blue-collar counterpart to last season's no-hope drug soldiers, who are on the scene this year too. If The Wire depicts...
...Crime & Punishment), and he says he already knows what the fourth L&O series will be (we're guessing Law & Order: Hearty Beef with Country Vegetables). The original L&O is a cool-headed procedural and law drama; SVU handles emotion-charged sex-crimes cases; CI is a Columboesque whodunit. But the brand promises certain constants: competent mysteries, intelligent but not intellectual, neatly wrapped up at the end of each episode; a pro-cop attitude; and little mushy stuff about characters' personal lives. For busy viewers, the label is a godsend: decisions, decisions...ah, hell, I'll just open...
Meloni transcends the script, playing Fuhrman slyly, as a charismatic boor with a lizardy grin. But his performance only reminds us what the story could have been if told by someone not so close to the hero. As it is, it's a trite but inadvertently intriguing whodunit about a bitter adolescent whose vanity and resentment make him act out in ugly ways. Oh, and it's about Michael Skakel too. --By James Poniewozik
Imagine a murdered man in the upstairs bedroom and the 8 Women in his life left to decide whodunit. What would they do? Bitch, bitch, bitch--and then break into song. Francois Ozon's color-coordinated catfight assembles eight fabulous femmes (Catherine Deneuve, Ludivine Sagnier, Virginie Ledoyen, Danielle Darrieux, Isabelle Huppert, Firmine Richard, Emmanuelle Beart and Fanny Ardant) for a game of hide-and-shriek, with each star given a guilty secret and a solo chanson. Ozon, the bright hope of French pop cinema (Water Drops on Burning Rocks, Under the Sand), lets the gals get a bit too chatty...
Indeed, Monk (which airs on USA Fridays at 10 p.m. E.T.) is the kind of distinctive, fresh series that the big networks could make but rarely do. It's a lighthearted whodunit--think of '70s shows like The Rockford Files--but with added sophistication and poignance, in part because of Shalhoub's dryly funny performance. But Shalhoub almost didn't take the part. "I liked [the script]," he says, "but I didn't see myself doing it." His manager told him to take a second look. "She was trying to tell me in a covert way that it was well...