While no one was looking, weekly procedural duty has been exported to Canada and Basic Cable. TNT provides cheap, low-calorie content with tasty sprinkles of quirk – you won’t see the cast of Criminal Minds running the Boston marathon, and Detective Stabler won’t ever keep a secret stash of candy in his desk. Meanwhile, our neighbors to the north have conquered choice tele-landscape on broadcast TV. Flashpoint carries the high-gloss aesthetic of CBS’ regular-season procedurals into the seedy corners of Toronto, while Rookie Blue is a cop version of ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy (which, turns out, is better than the doctor version of Grey’s Anatomy.) One imagines the out-of-work cops from the Law & Order-verse waving their fists at the Cable/Canada axis of evil: They took our jobs!
Thank Washington there’s still one red-blooded American solving crimes on a red-blooded broadcast network. Admittedly, he’s British…but what’s more American than being from Britain?
Playgirl model
