Feds close in on the Mob

By FRANCES GRANT

The gap in the schedules left by The Sopranos just got wider. Not only will there be a long wait for fans of the sophisticated mob drama - the next season won't even screen in America until next year - but it seems unlikely there will be any satisfactory replacement.

The closest thing to a successor is the show which has taken over The Sopranos' slot, Line of Fire (TV2, 9.30pm), American commercial network ABC's answer to the hit HBO suburban Mafia series.

Line of Fire is a cops and mobsters drama, set in Richmond, which parallels the doings of the local crime syndicate and the team of Feds dedicated to bringing them down.

Last week's first episode began with a dramatic on-foot chase scene which ended in the mutual shootings of agent and low-life mobster - a lose-lose situation that signalled the sombre intent of the show.

But the double deaths of Fed and mobster ended up taking a backseat, as much of the episode was taken up introducing the cast and establishing the drama's requisite tough and gritty credentials.

Crime boss Jonah Malloy set about settling scores straight away with a couple of nasty scenes of torture and violent murder ending with what will obviously be his "quirky" signature saying: "that's that with that".

This show doesn't shy away from Sopranos-style brutality but so far, anyway, the violence is gratuitous. In The Sopranos it is nearly always the explosion point after a long, slow build-up of psychological or emotional pressures.

As the team began dealing with the death of one their own, we got to meet worldweary boss, the chain-smoking Lisa Cohen (Leslie Hope, who played Jack Bauer's wife in the first series of 24).

The rest of the characters are pretty much straight from central casting: Jennifer Sampson is agent by day, wife and mother by night; Amiel MacArthur is a sensitive, caring kind of guy devastated by the death of his partner; rookie Paige (Leslie Bibb, teen queen in Popular) is a September 11 widow intent on avenging her husband's death by fighting the bad guys, any bad guys.

Like all pale imitations, Line of Fire works mainly to show how good the original actually is. But although it suffers in comparison with The Sopranos, it fares much better when contrasted with more run-of-the-mill telly crime dramas.

It is confident enough to run its most dramatic scenes without the cliche frenetic drum track, for a start. And it is certainly in tune with the times. When told of his soldier's death at the hands of the Feds, Malloy said, "Assemble the men. We may be at war here". Another conflict for a country which seems to be at war with many things. Agent Paige's confusion of fighting crime with the war against terrorism seems entirely understandable.

Ultimately, however, there proved to be room for only one boss in this telly territory. Line of Fire was whacked after just one season, a fate which some US critics believed was undeserved.

Life, for the majority of US telly dramas, is nasty, brutish and short. So, as Jonah Malloy would say, that's that with that.