Cops deserve a yeah-right Tui ad

Everyone is ridiculously good-looking and every hunch from out of nowhere proves correct.

New cop show too good to be true, writes Sarah Lang

Not every TV show has to be grittily true to life, but vaguely believable would be nice - otherwise just set it on another planet or in some parallel universe. Crossing Lines, a European crime drama that premieres Thursday on the BOX, makes Game of Thrones look realistic.

It follows a team of elite cops plucked from all over the continent and authorised by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate cross-border crimes.

Unsurprisingly, the show has faced criticism for misrepresenting the ICC. The actual organisation has jurisdiction only over war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity - oh, and it has no police force, let alone a special-crimes unit.

But in the fantasy world of the show, the ICC is trying something new. In the double-episode pilot it is hunting down a serial killer who is murdering women in the public parks of European capitals.

The 10-episode series was created and written by Edward Allen Bernero, a former cop who co-created the hit crime show Third Watch and short-lived spin-off Criminal Minds: Suspect Behaviour, after producing, writing and directing for Criminal Minds.

So it's no surprise his new show is a close cousin to those acronymised crime dramas (CSI, NCIS) and their spin-offs, where everyone is ridiculously good-looking, every hunch from out of nowhere proves correct, and everything feels too slick and simplistic. Add the futuristic gadgets of Minority Report and a protagonist with the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes, and you get Crossing Lines.

The virtual mind-reader is Carl Hickman (Prison Break's William Fichtner), a former NYPD cop who was shot on the job, left with a crippled right hand, then fired. Now he's living from morphine patch to morphine patch in an Amsterdam trailer park.

Drug-addled, unable to shoot and hardly emotionally stable, he needs some convincing to join the team. In a downright silly scene, the other cops start quoting Hickman's CV highlights to him, bizarrely finishing one another's sentences. It's an example of a script that tries to be pacey and snappy but just comes off as peculiar.

There are so many yeah-right moments that this show deserves its own Tui ad - such as when we discover that ICC staffer Louis (Marc Lavoine) has lured and flown these top cops here without getting approval from his own organisation. When ICC bigwig Michel (Donald Sutherland) says the elite team is a no-go, one of the implausibly gorgeous female cops changes his mind by quoting an emotive report he once penned; minutes later Michel has changed the minds of the other ICC top dogs.

The ridiculousness peaks when Michel passes Louis information he can use to murder the man responsible for his son's death.

Sutherland's gravitas and Fichtner's brilliance still can't save this show. So far it's a patchwork of its police-procedural predecessors, while attempting to do something new that never quite comes off.

Let's hope it improves.

Crossing Lines premieres Thursday 9.30pm on the BOX (encores Sundays, 10.30pm).