TV Eye: Good cop, bad cop, fashion cop

Gabriel Byrnes, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Christopher Eccleston in The Shadow Line. Photo / Supplied

The Shadow Line, SoHo's new cop show, opens promisingly. There's a drug tsar, just released, mysteriously, from the pokey courtesy of a royal pardon, found shot dead. Two coppers on the beat find the body.

The old copper, who chews gum and talks like some parody of a hardened bobby on the make, has a good old poke around on the body. The young cop, presumably not yet on the make, ventures that he doesn't think they're supposed to touch the body.

"My world, my rules," says the old copper, before launching, almost poetically, into his theory of "truth". This is about following the line of least resistance: "All you have to do is find the line and follow it back up... You find the line on something like this, all it's going to do is fur up your arteries so thick you'll think you're a f***ing werewolf."

What's 'e on about then? Who knows? All we will (eventually) discover, although even a werewolf might have guessed at it, is that he certainly is on the make. When he's given cash for information, he asks for an envelope, addresses the envelope to his wife, and instructs the crook to mail it for him.

"Like Prince Charles, we can't carry cash."

Right, so we have the crooked cop and the, possibly, good cop, who is Jonah Gabriel (Chiwetel Ejiofor), just back on the job having spent three months in a coma. His buddy was killed by the bullet that is now lodged, unable to be removed, in Gabriel's brain. Nobody knows what it'll do to him. He doesn't know what happened. He has amnesia - here an infectious condition which spreads to us, at home, on the couch, wondering: what the hell's going on, and what's with the werewolf?

Never mind, it looks fabulous: All shadows and menace.

There's a terrifically good and terrifically terrifying psycho: Jay (Rafe Spall), the nephew of the dead drug tsar. He threatens mothers and unborn babies and holds a cat in a barrel of water, which is nothing to him. Five minutes in and he castrates a bloke in a lift. Well, that bloke really should have known better than to make squealing pig noises at him. (Jason also got a mysterious pardon.)

There's a would be player, Joseph Bede, (Christopher Eccleston) in the dead guy's drug game: a flower seller (it's a front) who has invested everything he has in setting up the front to make enough money to buy decent care for his wife who has early-onset Alzheimer's.

That might be pushing it: a cop with amnesia and a crook's wife with Alzheimer's and nobody knows anything or won't tell.

Two episodes in and we're little the wiser as to what happened to Gabriel, or the dead guy, or to the dead guy's driver, who is on the run. And who is the mysterious man in the fedora? Is he a goodie or a baddie? Or the real psycho? Who are the real baddies? Time will tell, or maybe not. I don't much care. It's not quite Cracker, but it's a cracker series so far.

Another cop show, of sorts, is Fashion Police (Wednesdays, 6.30pm, ETV), which I adore because it's so rude. I don't know how they get away with it because the people they are rude about - or Joan Rivers, that miracle of plastic surgery is, mainly, because she gets to play really, really rude cop - are Hollywood celebrities.

You know when Rivers is about to slip in the stiletto heel when she claims to be very, very close to, say, Nicole Kidman or Sharon Stone.

The very rudest thing I ever heard her say was about Sharon Stone, who was wearing a grey fur jacket which, said Rivers, worked because it matched the hair on her... no, far too rude.

Actually, on last week's Grammy special she said something so rude about Rihanna's black roots, that it really is unrepeatable.

And on some singer's hairdo: "this hairstyle is called the Demi Moore because it's disturbingly unbalanced."

Perhaps she can get away with this stuff and go on living and working in Hollywood because she's so surgically altered that she no longer looks like a real person. She's a parody of a person, making fun of silly people wearing silly clothes, and paying some equally silly stylists fortunes to look like fools.

-TimeOut