CSI: CRime Scene Investigations (RTE1, Monday)Crime and Punishment (BBC2, Tuesday and Wednesday)Rasputin: Devil in the Flesh (C.4, Monday)The Double Life of Jonathan King (C.4, Monday)I Fada (TG4, Thursday)
Cut the detectives on CSI: Crime Scene Investigators and they'll bleed pints of thick, scarlet justice. This week brought its pilot episode, but you quickly learned that when these forensic scientists of the Las Vegas police force are on the beat, no case goes unsolved. However stinky the corpse, they will always stay on the scent. "Concentrate on what cannot lie. The evidence," said one of them sagely. "And if that doesn't work, then just plant the evidence on them," he did not add.
You can see why CSI has become the third most watched programme in the US. Here we have a group of people who solve crimes the old pure way. There's no need to beat up on a suspect or to put the squeeze on his moll. They don't pull out toe-nails to get the truth, but instead - as they did this week - find them in a murder victim's shoe and then use them to prove the identity of the killer by the time the credits roll. They are Sherlock Holmes only with bigger magnifying glasses.
They work through the dark hours, because, after all, Las Vegas is a city that only comes out at night. There are baffling murders trailing tantalisingly oblique clues. The detectives look at a suicide and have an instant hunch it's a murder. They're all instantly familiar as characters. There is a single mom struggling to keep home and career. The black guy says "my ass" a lot. His new partner gets shot up bad on her very first day. The wise old head, Gil Grissom, is a quirky chap who eats grasshoppers and sees art where others see splattered brain fragments. And the Chief, well he's called Sgt Brass and HE SHOUTS AT EVERYBODY. It is all so warmly recognisable, it almost brings a tear to your eye.
Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of such movies as Top Gun, The Rock and Con Air, is behind CSI, so we probably shouldn't be expecting Dostoevsky here. What we do get is slick procedural drama, with some displays of diverting trickery. It has a propensity for extreme close-ups that go all the way to microscopic level. This week it borrowed from Gulf War movie Three Kings and followed the trajectory of the bullet into a corpse. And it shows a seedy, low-rent side of Las Vegas seldom seen. Nobody stepped foot inside a casino. The Golden Nugget did not have a walk-on role.
Better, it also reads like a crash course in forensic science. From here on in, no one will nab the last Jaffa Cake in The Irish Times office and expect to get away with it. Anyway, while you can see the bolts that hold it together, you only realise its creakiness after you've got off the ride at the end. Like the pre-pupal larvae on a seven-day old corpse, this is a series that might get under the skin.
Of course, if you were expecting Dostoevsky, then you could have gone for BBC2's production of Crime and Punishment. Adapted by Tony Marchant, this was television which I suspect a lot of people will have begun watching because they believed it would be good for them. So is cauliflower. Not many will have stuck with it for its three-hour duration over two nights. That's a lot of television time, especially when on Wednesday, its second night, you could catch the Irish giving the Russians a hard time instead of just watching them do it to each other.
Anyway, for all its stylish promise, once it had wound its way like a spinning top to Raskolnikov's murder of the pawnbroker and her maid, it began to wobble badly. No amount of stylising - saturated colours, angular camerawork, moments of super-fast motion and others of super-slow - could hold the interest. It sparked best in the tactical shenanigans of the detective Porfiry (Ian McDiarmid), only for those scenes to shine a light on John Simm's less convincing performance as Raskolnikov. Greasy hair, weak beard, burnt-out eyes and brooding shiftiness do not dip far enough into the human condition; he skimmed across the surface of the character. Besides, Simm hardly stood still for a moment; his condition regularly propelling him through the streets of St Petersburg. Apparently you do a lot of running when consumed by guilt. He covered more ground over each 90-minutes than even Roy Keane could have hoped to.
Anyone giving up and switching over to Rasputin: Devil in the Flesh might have taken a few minutes to realise it wasn't the same programme they'd just abandoned.
Lots of grainy film of an unshaven, long-haired man in a long coat, running through the streets of St Petersburg as the madness takes hold. Channel 4 must have realised there would be a lot of itchy remote control fingers out there. In fact, the more you think about it, the more they must have practically choked on their own smartness.
Beneath these slightly overbearing re-constructions, though, was an infinitely fascinating tale of which we all know the last chapter. Rasputin rose from being a boozing, lecherous peasant with supposed healing powers to being the powerful man in the Russian royal court and, to the public, the devil incarnate.
In case you need a refresher on your Junior Cert history: Rasputin survived an initial attempt on his life that involved an assassin with no nose pulling his intestines from his body. A couple of years later, his enemies poisoned him, then shot him. After celebrating somewhat prematurely, they then shot him some more, bludgeoned him with a steel cosh and eventually succeeded in finishing him off by drowning him in the frozen Volga. As they say in CSI, concentrate on the evidence.
'THIS is not the end of Jonathan King," insisted the former radio DJ and music promoter, now doing seven years for abuse of teenage boys over a 30-year period. The weakest thing about The Double Life of Jonathan King was its title. He did not live a double life at all, but a very singular existence. He just got away with it for three decades.
Jon Ronson's deeply disquieting documentary showed both King and those he consorted with to be even more remorseless, self-aggrandising and manipulative than one had already realised. King, speaking via a video diary recorded before his conviction, came across as endlessly irritating, pathetic, unapologetic and more than slightly unhinged. His self-justification - that he is both the centre of a grand conspiracy and that the teenagers were consensual lovers not victims - echoed in a hotel room somewhere in Europe where his former colleague Chris Denning was interviewed. Also an ex-DJ and convicted paedophile, still wanted in the UK on further charges, he was smug and glowering, wrapped tightly in his own rational.
Throughout the interview, a young man sat on a chair behind him, shuffling with boredom, paying little attention to the interview. He remained un-named, un-remarked upon. It was disconcerting in the extreme.
What makes Ronson such an excellent journalist is that he refuses to set out with a defined polemic, instead talking the viewer through his own thought processes at each turn, airing his doubts, admitting that he struggles with the question of why some boys did return again and again. It's an approach which shows both rare trust in the viewer's intelligence and an acknowledgement that these questions do not get answered in the space taken up by a tabloid headline.
Finally, to Í Fada which was a straightforward, bluffers' guide to a decade-plus of Ecstasy culture but was notable because it was made by people born of that generation rather than by those preaching from outside it. You don't hear it often enough, but the revolution Ecstasy brought was real, in the cultural if not quite the oft-cited spiritual sense. It radically altered popular music and live entertainment. It affected film-making and advertising. It created its own fashion, informed art and graphic design. It gave the world a sparkling, energetic visual reference point through which we can view the world.
In a roundabout way, then, without the age of Ecstasy even TG4 would not look the way it does today.
tvreview@irish-times.ie