KEY POINTS:
Crime. It's supposed to hit other people. Television makes sure no one escapes. The schedules creak under the numbers of crime shows pushed at us. This looks exciting. It could also be a sign of a genre taking on water before sinking.
History says a genre worked this hard is one being squeezed before the viewers yawn and it's gone, leaving makers with the weary trudge back to finding something new.
It won't be the first time. Remember westerns? All horses, real men in chaps, cattle, gunfights, angry poker games, rough justice and women as wise mother or wise not-mother. Oat operas galloped all over the time slots. Then they didn't. All the stories were told. They had tapped out. Gone. Deadwood flickered but that's been it.
The West was lost. Situation comedies stormed in, loaded with every variation on family, home or workplace, healthy or dysfunctional, and with or without special powers. One even tossed in a horse as a lead character. Sitcoms spread so fast everything else fought for oxygen.
The sitcom's final admission of the end approaching was Seinfeld being proudly branded as a show about nothing. It had to be. Everything else was gone.
By then sitcoms had shoved the private eyes into retirement. Reality shows came and are going. Hospitals and doctors fight on but cough badly. ER's scorched earth policy burned storylines at the rate of about seven per show. So little is left the producers of House have fallen back on "physician, heal thyself", an addicted lead character trying to get through a day without chemical help.
Crime is hardly new. The Bible is full of it. Television followed its lead.
There has been grit (Z Cars), lovable Cockneys (The Sweeney). We have had manic underlings (The Shield), manic superiors (Kojak) and manic stations (Hill Street Blues). Even famously boring scene examinations have fleshed out to become the CSI industry. Psychologists racked by character flaws (Cracker) have passed our way.
Local crime came down State Highway 16 from Helensville's Mortimer's Patch to the overwrought Street Legal, its characters wilting at being more than a few hundred metres from a latte.
The grave and mature Law and Order plugs steadily on. There has been brilliance from Homicide: Life on the Streets and in the Greek tragedy of The Sopranos. Women move front and centre for Cold Case and Saving Grace and lawyers get another crack this week with the start of Justice on TV2 tomorrow night.
Sadly, the strain shows. Dexter has sealed the circle, the hero as both investigator of a serial killer and the actual serial killer.
Sensing Murder, a New Zealand reality show, has a psychic trying to solve cold cases.
This reaches so deep into a trawl for something new it is beyond parody.
Hope, or the final death throes, might be out there, in The Wire, clinically dissecting a society, the city of Baltimore. Currently playing in the US, it examines crime and the education system, after seasons looking at the ghettos, politics and the unions.
It was here for a few moments but was dumped. In the meantime we watch whatever is sold as the hot new crime show, which just might be another foot stamping down on its coffin lid.
