Jenny and I watched Raines, the new NBC policier with Jeff Goldblum as a homicide detective who sees dead people. We both really liked the pilot. Goldblum is good and has a great supporting cast (Matt Craven, Nicole Sullivan, Malik Yoba). The pilot's guest cast is straight from Hey, It's That Guy Central Casting: Valerie Mahaffey, Jeff Perry and Graham Beckel, plus future superstar Alexa Davalos. The writing is sharp. The opening mystery was twisty enough to keep us guessing for most of the episode (although we saw the final twist coming from about the opening scene). Yeah, you can read the pitch pretty easily: "House meets The Closer meets The Sixth Sense," but the individual elements work so well, that it's easy to ignore that.
We both felt that the pilot "assed out" (Cousin Pottymouth's term, not mine) at the end, although for different reasons. Jenny felt that the solution to the mystery didn't make any sense. I bought that part, but didn't like the extended denouement, in which Raines intervenes in the victim's family -- too Touched by an Angel/Ghost Whisperer for my tastes.
We also each felt that Raines said something about where we are in terms of pop culture. Jenny: "It used to be that the criminals were mentally ill. Now it's all the cops." Peter: "There sure are a lot of shows about dead people floating around these days. What's with that?" Neither of us bothered to develop our theses any further, though. I think you can fill in the blanks: "Frank Miller blah blah blah Millennium, September 11, Alan Ball, etc, etc."
We watched the pilot on Jenny's TiVo, so I'm not positive about this, but I think Raines airs Thursdays at 10:00 EDT, on NBC.
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