“Life” — Pilot
I don’t have a lot to say about Life. I watched it late last night when I probably should have been watching Top Chef, but I was in a groove and had heard that the pilot was pretty good. The pilot was pretty good, but this isn’t a show for me. I can’t do procedural cop dramas — even the good ones. Life is just like Raines, NBC’s previous quirky know-it-all cop drama set in L.A. Our hero is a bit of an outcast detective who takes to the streets solving murders while catching curious looks for co-workers. In this iteration Charles Crews is a detective who served twelve years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now he’s out with a mysterious settlement by LAPD, independently wealthy, and for some reason still working cases.
He also likes fruit, I guess.
Again, this isn’t a bad show. There’s a pretty interested device they use going in and out of a lot of the commercial breaks where we see 16mm interview footage of people from Crews’ life talking about his time in prison. It’s an interesting way to tell a story that in and of itself isn’t particularly interesting. For a police procedural, the actual crime of the week takes a back seat to the story of our main character (as it should), and his lack of freedom for the past dozen years (as well as a good amount of Zen reading) has given him a personality not unlike a crazy person making him fairly interesting to just watch. In a fictional universe where I get home from work on an average Wednesday and have nothing to watch, I could see giving Life an hour of mine, but right now it simply isn’t in the cards.
My dear, you look absolutely perplexed.
