A Long Expected Part III

(Allusion to "A Long-Expected Party." You know the book...)

Okay, finally a note about a new TV show. (While it's a good idea in public speaking to tell the audience what you're going to say, say what you said you'd say, and then tell the audience that you said what you promised; in blogs and other serial written material it can be a drag, a burden, an obligation hanging nastily over your head.)

The show is Raines. It stars Jeff Goldblum as a police detective with mental issues. If you never watch TV, you can skip this entry, but then again, it might be fun to know some pop culture without having to go through actually exposing yourself to the disease. heh heh.

Anyway, in a structuralist look, Raines is rather like a cross between Monk, Medium (and Ghost Whisperer), early Crossing Jordan, and maybe a dash of House thrown in. That is, Raines talks to the dead murder victim(s) whose death he is investigating. The Monkian aspect is, however, that he's really imagining/hallucinating them. Nevertheless, like in Medium, they won't go away until he has helped them out by finding their killer and maybe some other deed he intuits that they'd want him to do if they really were haunting him. (The dash of House is that many of his acquaintances think he's a jerk, but to some, he's so good at what he does that it's to be endured, and to his ex-partner, at least, Raines is a likeable jerk.) The Crossing Jordan aspect is that he re-imagines the crime events and they're shown as scenes that happened or might have happened. (CSI did that first, and Crossing Jordan's role-playing with her father was a riff on that, and now Raines is a riff on a riff.)

Golblum, like John Wayne before him, is very good at playing variations on a particular kind of character. If you liked Goldblum in any of the following: Independence Day, Jurrassic Park, Buckaroo Bonsai; then you'll probably like him in this. If not, then even if you do watch TV, this may not be the show for you. Since it's the haitus-replacement for ER, that could be a really cruel fact of life if you are an ER fan.

In my case, I've never started with ER, so I'll have no problem watching this replacement. (Or rather taping it to watch the next day, since it would keep me up later than I prefer.)