European TV

In the US: Wednesdays, 8/7c, NBC

How much do you love Debra Messing? A little bit? A lot? Don’t worry, it’s not a crime to admit it. Okay, she was somewhat overshadowed by Megan Mullally on Will and Grace, which should probably have been called Jack and Karen by the end, but objectively she was a lot of fun in that and you might well have a soft spot for her because of Prey, too.

All the same, unless on a scale from 1-10 you rate Messing as “11! 11! How could it be anything but 11, you damn fool! She’s a goddess!”, you’re probably going to want to give The Mysteries of Laura a wide berth. To start with, the show is adapted from Spain’s La 1’s Los misterios de Laura, which isn’t itself the finest piece of work ever to hit the airwaves.

But this NBC take elevates a slightly tedious, obvious show about a single mother who’s also a cop to whole new levels of pain and misery for the viewer. I mean McG (Charlie’s Angels, This Means War) not only exec produces but is also the director of the pilot episode, and having his name attached to anything is pretty much a guarantee of horror greater than a rabies infection. Even given that terrible baseline, though, the writers and producers work ever so hard in partnership with McG to give us something of almost weaponised toxicity.

The show’s one big joke is that Messing’s character brings her police skills to bear on her private life and her mothering skills to bear on her work life. So Messing goes around investigating the ‘crime scenes’ caused by her children while simultaneously mothering and wiping clean the victims of crime. In pretty much every scene. It wasn’t funny in the first scene; it wasn’t funny in the last.

It flags pretty much everything about a mile off, has insulting characters with the depth of the average dew drop and although it’s clearly supposed to be a comedy drama, rather than a procedural per se, has an approach to plausibility and police work on a par with Trumpton. There is almost no gender or racial stereotype the show isn’t happy to exploit (sassy black woman? Check. Bitchy Latina? Check.), no subtlety or change in working conditions since the 1970s that it isn’t willing to ignore. It is the pan-galactic gargle blaster of crime shows, but without the benefits of alcohol.

But Messing’s good. I like her.