The most pervasive thought when taking in a crime procedural - whether it's Criminal Minds or Bones, or anything in between - is that sense that you've seen it all before, that you know what is going to happen next, that you anticipate roughly how any given episode will play out.
As Glen Creeber says in The Television Genre Book, "in recent years, as the television companies compete for a diminishing share of the audience, there has been a proliferation of police, detective and crime drama, with endless variations and reworkings of a basic formula in which society is protected and the status quo maintained by the forces of law and order."* In short, all procedurals are fundamentally the same.
Yet the very thing that makes crime procedurals so predictable, so easy to watch, is exactly what makes a show like Person of Interest (which finished a decent first season on Monday) or Hawaii Five-O (which recently returned to Tuesdays on TV3) stand out from the rest of the bunch: they subvert what we're expecting, surprising us and abandoning the established formula.
I've written about Person of Interest before, sharing how I enjoyed its reversal of the procedural formula by surprising us, not with twists in the story, but bychanges in the core details of each episode - the character we thought was a victim turns out to be the perpetrator or a character's reasoning turned out to be something we didn't expect. Monday's finale was a perfect example of this: the character Finch and Reese were trying to help turned out to have set them up by exploiting her knowledge of the mysterious machine they use to identify targets.
Hawaii Five-O, on the other hand, is more straightforward with its weekly story - a crime takes place in the first act, the Five-O team investigates, a couple of high-speed chases (maybe involving a helicopter) take place, and the case is solved.
One thing it does well, and which it has in common with Person of Interest, is that it uses an extensive and complicated story that weaves its way through each episode: the writers on Five-O do a good job of presenting a different case each week, while also servicing that over-arching narrative in only a few scenes in each episode.
Person of Interest did a good job with weaving in a longer storyline, too, by using flashbacks to relevant back story and dialogue between its main characters. And while it is easy to gloss over, we're actually talking about a complicated form of genre-splicing: the formulaic style of a procedural, only with characters that are as fleshed out as any you might find on your average cable drama.
If you ask me, it's that clever combination of formula and long-form narrative that makes procedurals like Hawaii Five-O and Person of Interest stand out from the pack. They're the first in a kind of "new school" of procedural writing. Long may it continue.
Did you enjoy Person of Interest? Are you enjoying Hawaii Five-O? What do you think makes a procedural stand out? What are your favourite crime procedurals right now?
(*) If you think that sounds overly academic, consider this: for a university assignment a couple of years ago, I spent more than 400 words discussing the ideological assumptions inherent in the crime procedural genre - for example, the notion of good triumphing over evil, or shows addressing public fear by portraying police management of security threats. Aside from a 2000-word essay on the depiction of grief in Inception, it was probably my favourite essay to write.
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Do you also think the number of police shows is somehow done to keep the population in fear so even more money is given to the police, FBI, Department of Homeland Security?
For me, procedurals stand out when a) the good guys sometimes lose; b) there is some form of overarching plot narrative rather than individual story entries; and c) you have well-rounded characters and writing that brings them out.
When you get a+b+c you can end up with absolute crackers: The Wire; Homicide on the Street.
A combination of 2 of a b or c gives a solid show: old school Law and Order, for instance.
When you have 1 or 0 of a b or c give it a miss.
Speaking of crime procedurals - have you been watching the second series of "The Killing"? I'm not sure where the show on SoHo is up to, but with the season finale airing in the US recently, would be interested to hear your thoughts! xox
All crime procedurals are rubbish. The "procedural" part of the genre classification is a giveaway.
I tend to agree with #1 - the quality of the cast is superior to its counterparts, especially Person of Interest - Jim Caviezel, Michael Emmerson & Taraji Henson. Scott Caan on Hawaii Five-0 is secretly one of the best supporting actors on TV at the moment.
This is a bit more old school, but it's hard to go past Robbie Coltrane in Cracker. An anti-hero if there ever was one, and if anything, more flawed than the individuals he was trying to analyze.
That and the fact it pulled no punches. When things went wrong, they went really wrong. No gloss. Even the grit had grit in it.
Loved Person of Interest and found it a refreshing change to the crime procedural for several reasons, all of which you and the other comments have covered.
And it has just a hint of vigilantism in it that always appeals. Reese is not bound by the rules that the usual heroes in Police procedural shows are, so that makes him imminently more interesting I think.
Hawaii Five-O also benefits from having one of the best theme tunes of all time. BOOM BOOM BOOMBOOMBOOM!
Forget Hawaii Five 0 Chris - pity you didn't chose to discuss the brilliant home grown police film 'Siege' that screened on TVOne this Sunday. What a film - was totally impressed and think it would definitely stand heads above anything that's been made in the states. No over acting on this one, it was gritty and realistic. Well done New Zealand on Air - this is what we want to see on our TV screens.
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Something else about both shows: The casting is a lot better than it really needs to be, even Jim Caviezel & Alex O'Loughlin's wet-cardboard lack of personality kind of works for their respective shows.