Canadian TV

In Canada: Tuesdays, 8pm ET, Bravo
In the UK: Acquired by Alibi. Will start Wednesday, June 13, 9pm

Is there a difference between the police investigations you see on TV and the ones in real-life? The obvious answer is “Yes, significantly,” and over the years, many TV shows have been meta enough to address this thorny problem. Usually, it’s a line like “This isn’t a TV show – it takes five weeks to get the results back from the lab in real-life!” but other shows have gone deeper.

Castle is the most recent popular recent example, giving us a crime novelist ostensibly shadowing a police detective for research, so he can learn how crimes are investigated in real-life. However, YouTube Red’s Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television* did similarly, with the eponymous Hansen playing a version of himself who teams up with a cop to solve crimes, while TV cameras follow him around for his own TV show. Meanwhile, both Pulaski and The World of Eddie Weary went one step further, adding to the meta to instead give us a TV show within a TV show, showing us both the actor playing a cop and then applying his skills to real life.

In all these shows, even if the civilian has been able to help out the cop, it’s been despite their fictional knowledge, rather than because of it, as they learn that the real-world doesn’t work by the same rules. However, Carter wants you to think that reality is just a TV script waiting to be filmed.

It stars renowned showkiller Jerry O’Connell (Sliders, Carpoolers, The Defenders) as an actor famous for his portrayal of a TV cop in Call Carter. However, after getting into a fight with the man who slept with his wife, he bows out from his world-famous role and returns to his home town in disgrace. There he hooks up with his childhood friends (Kristian Bruun and Sydney Poitier) when a friend of his is charged with murder and he tries to help cop Poitier to solve the crime.

The Carter administration

Given this is coming to Alibi in the UK, you won’t be shocked to hear that this is all genteel, formulaic stuff. Carter moves around from traditional crime-solving scene to crime-solving scene asking the sorts of questions you expect from TV crime shows, prefacing them with lengthy spiels about how these are the sorts of questions you expect in TV crime shows and how his vast knowledge of the genre means he’ll be able to solve the crime. And hey presto! He’s right. Every time.

Will the medical examiner – after a bit of protestation about rules, regulations and how if there had been anything unusual she’d have put it in the report – mention a useful clue if O’Connell presses her a bit because ‘this is the point where I ask, “Was there anything unusual?” and they say, “Well, there was one thing…”‘? Of course she will. Will there be a last-minute, final-act twist that O’Connell flags up as a ‘last-minute, final-act twist’? Of course there will.

This isn’t really satire – it’s ‘have your cake and eat it’ television that sticks rigorously to a nearly exhausted formula and hopes that if you point out the formula at every turn, you can somehow breathe new life into it and get away with it, rather than expose its flaws. O’Connell’s character is the only one with any real depth or even personality traits, with Kristian Bruun and Sydney Poitier there because O’Connell needs someone to talk to, rather than because they offer anything themselves. Carter‘s not even especially insightful in spelling out how police reality should differ from fiction before eating its cake; it simply knows how scripts are plotted.

Not an unstoppable sex machine

That said, Carter isn’t without a few surprises up its sleeve. O’Connell’s Carter isn’t the low-brained actor you might expect – he’s got a photographic memory and is actually quite smart, remembering medical concepts about stress-induced amnesia from a script and applying that to solve the crime. He and his pals also grew up together investigating crimes and they actually became famous for catching a serial killer, so it’s not as though he’s coming to this fresh.

There’s also the occasional flash of amusing dialogue, such as when Poitier talks about reality not having a ‘third act revelation’ and O’Connell points out that one-hour crime dramas are based around a five-act structure.

But honestly, beyond the amazing discovery that O’Connell can still sometimes be an enjoyable and even likeable screen presence – what happened after Sliders? – there’s so little to Carter than no one but the most avid crime drama fan will get much from this. Don’t get Carter if you can avoid it.

In Canada: Sundays, 9pm ET, CTV
In the UK: Acquired by Channel 5

Sometimes a name just leaps out at you. Sometimes a name leaps out at you as being particularly British.

The Detail at first looks like a completely ordinary – some might even say paralysingly ordinary – female police procedural. I shouldn’t need to specify ‘female’ since

1. There should be plenty of women in police procedurals anyway
2. There shouldn’t be a difference between procedurals that feature mainly men and those that feature mainly women.

Yet as we know from the likes of Women’s Murder Club and Rizzoli & Isles, female police procedurals are usually 50% about a desperately uninteresting and mundane crime and about 50% about their police’s great friendships and relationships with their usually cheating boyfriends and/or alcohol. They also don’t really follow police procedure at all – although that’s true of a lot of police procedurals, to be fair.

The Devil

Here, Shenae Grimes-Beech (Degrassi High) stars as ‘street smart’ Detective Jacqueline ‘Jack’ Cooper, who has keen investigative skills, but a messy personal life. That means she drinks a lot and has accidentally been dating a married man (Rookie Blue‘s Ben Bass) for a year, and doesn’t find out until she’s about to move in with him and he dumps her (pre-title sequence). Some detective, hey, something she herself points out as if the script hopes that the audience will give that stupidity a pass if it points it out itself.

Meanwhile, Angela Griffin (off that Coronation Street no less) stars as Detective Stevie Hall, a sharp quick-witted interrogator who is Jack’s mentor, who has to balance the demands of work and her complicated family life, as well as the arrival of her ex (of 15 years previously) David Cubbitt on the scene.

Lastly, Wendy Crewson (Frankie Drake Mysteries) plays the homicide unit’s boss, ‘who works overtime to secure justice, no matter what the cost’. You know, I’d quite like to have a cop show where everyone works regular hours for a change.

All of which is pretty dull to start with and only gets duller as we investigate our initial crime. Has a doctor murdered his wife, who appears to have committed suicide? He was having an affair with a nurse, after all.

Cue Grimes-Beech over-identifying with the nurse, getting overly involved in the case, Griffin warning her, Crewson telling her to stick to the rules, etc. That’s when she’s not abusing her police powers to track down Bass’s home and wife.

I mean, sure, it manages to integrate the relationships and the investigations better than Women’s Murder Club and its ‘magic Oprah door’. But ‘yawn’ all the same.

No redemption

So what was the British name that leapt out at me and made me spare a second thought for The Detail, you might be wondering? Well, a fact little mentioned in all the publicity but mentioned in the titles is that despite the showrunner and show developer being Ley Lukins (Lost Girl, Rookie Blue, Saving Hope), the first episode is ‘based on a script by’ Sally Wainwright, who’s also a producer on the show.

‘Sally Wainwright’, hey? Pretty English, hey? That’s why it leapt out me. But someone who watches UK TV more than me, particularly female-centric police dramas, might have recognised her immediately as the creator of Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax and Scott & Bailey. Not inconsequential dramas – some, in fact, highly regarded.

On top of that, as well as in front of the camera with Griffin, look behind the camera and you’ll see vast hordes of top Brits, including noted producer and long-time Russell T Davies collaborator Nicola Shindler, who also worked with Wainwright on Happy Valley et al.

So how come, despite all this female talent and this being just the right #MeToo moment to launch a female-centric police procedural, The Detail is just so generic, so bland, so totally unremarkable and indistinguishable from all the shows that have gone before it?

Maybe they’ve used up all their ideas for the genre on the proceeding shows. Maybe it’s because Lukins’ previous shows were pretty generic, too, and her development of Wainwright’s script rendered it equally soporific. Maybe it’s because it’s CTV, which doesn’t have a stellar drama track record and something got lost in the translation. Maybe it’s because it’s Canadian TV, where sometimes people forget that while assembling a diverse cast is a good thing, you still need to equip them with decent scripts.

Or maybe it’s because female police procedurals are simply converging with male police procedurals – to become as dull as each other.

Whatever the reason, unless I plan on catching up on my sleep soon, I don’t think I’ll be paying attention to The Detail.

UPDATE: It turns out that it really is an adaptation of Scott & Bailey!