Murder In Mind (BBC 1, Sunday)
The State We're In (RTE 1, Tuesday)
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(UTV, Monday)
The West Wing (RTE 1, Tuesday)
I don't know what's going on at the BBC, but it's gone murder crazy. You can't turn on the television in the evening without a body slumping out of the set, a knife in its back. Somebody has decided that crime is what viewers want and crime is what they're going to get, even if it means shooting dramas at them from a pump-action shotgun until one of them hits the target. But though they keep pulling the trigger, we've long since stopped feeling the need to duck.
After some tepid crime two-parters, the BBC has come up with a new swizz. Murder In Mind bills itself as a series of slayings told from the murderers' viewpoints.
Ooh, you think, something smart and challenging, even a little controversial. A chance to get inside the complex mind of a cold-blooded killer, to try to understand why people do such horrible things. And, if nothing else, there's sure to be a twist that'll make you drop your Chocolate Kimberley into your tea.
Instead, we got David Suchet playing Edward Palmer, a respectable headmaster who accidentally killed a rent boy after a botched mugging, then spent the rest of his screen time lying to police and furrowing his brow. He was very bald, which gave him a lot of brow to furrow.
Technically, of course, it wasn't even murder, but self-defence, Palmer's aim being to protect his career from revelations of gay cruising and manslaughter. The Respectable Middle-Class Life In Mind doesn't sound so snappy, though.
Luckily, he had his daughter, a nurse, by his side. She was only too happy to help, by saving him as he pumped his car full of exhaust fumes, then suggesting they kill the only witness to the killing, a blackmailing junkie whose body the police will probably step over on the way to help an old lady cross the street. It was a brilliant plan, foiled only by the fact that she'd forgotten her daddy didn't have murder in mind.
She did it anyway, planting their weapon on the witness and thereby framing him for the first killing. Because Palmer was in his house, correcting homework, the cops assumed he had nothing to do with the whole nasty mess.
QED. Done and dusted. All the loose ends neatly tied up with a granny knot. Palmer resorted to plan A and ran the exhaust pipe back in to his car. I knew how he felt.
There might have been a twist in there somewhere, but it was so weak, so ephemeral, that I sat right through the credits waiting for it, and was still rooted there for God Save The Queen at the end of the night. I can't be sure, but I think the dramatic flourish may have had something to do with a young girl, a blackboard and a toy clown. I'll keep you posted.
The not-so-subtle plan in Murder In Mind was to poison the junkie with a concoction of dangerous medicines, which seemed unnecessarily complicated when they could have made him drink a glass of Irish tap water instead.
The State We're In went sniffing about the slurry spills, sewage facilities, effluent run-offs and algae invasions of Ireland. Every time a dead fish bobbed to the surface of a murky river, you could hear a bottled-water salesman whoop with joy somewhere in the distance.
Duncan Stewart, its presenter, stomps about the countryside looking as if he'll barge through any farmer, cow, tree or mountain that gets in his way. He seems never to blink, perhaps for fear that it will put him off his stride.
He pops up in fields, wades through lakes, comes round corners. If you've seen the Fast Show sketch with the lad who marches through scenery yelling, "brilliant!", Stewart is who he'll be when he grows up.
Stewart's awkward presentation suits the programme down to the ground. The science bits are done without fuss, the nature-lover stuff with passion. But even Stewart's Forrest Gump-style trek must make way for the filming, which is pristine and rich and makes Ireland look beautiful to every last blade of grass, whatever is going on beneath the surface. It's only a pity The State We're In has such an early slot. If Stewart comes marching through your sitting room one of these days, be sure to clap him on the back.
Michelle Collins is one of those actors whom television executives reckon we loved having in our sitting room three nights a week when she was in a soap opera, as Cindy in EastEnders. This makes them think we'll still love having her three nights a week in whatever half-baked rubbish they can find.
It's the same with Nick Berry, Sarah Lancashire and Stephen Tompkinson. It's as if they live in a secret factory in which prime-time dramas featuring bank-robbing photographers with hearts of gold, or struggling single mothers who become kick-boxers, are churned out like cheap jewellery.
Only James Nesbitt has more airtime than Collins, and he's on so much I dreamt about him the other night. When ubiquity becomes that subliminal, it's time to pawn the television.
Collins is ubiquitous to the point where I'm beginning to think of her as a flatmate I don't have to cook for. She turned up again this week in Perfect, the first of a two-parter in which she plays a woman who loves weddings so much that she has lots of them, only without bothering to wait for the divorce.
It's a dangerous game she's playing, and things are bound to backfire. Although, if her husbands take half as long to catch up with her as Perfect takes to get going, we could be waiting until Christmas.
It's filmed in that NYPD Blue style where the camera lurches about so drunkenly it's a wonder it doesn't clobber one of the cast. Collins is a great character actor, if being a character actor means wearing a push-up bra and a pull-up skirt in every role.
Perfect started half an hour before Clocking Off on BBC 1, obviously in a ploy by UTV to filch viewers from BBC 1. What Perfect took an hour and a half to say, however, Clocking Off gave you before the opening titles had finished.
I missed it this week, because I watched Perfect instead. Should I ever make that mistake again, may God strike me down with the collected works of Michelle Collins.
THE BBC drama can't expect to be as tight, as relentless and as gripping as The West Wing, either, but little can. Yet the second series of the White House drama only reinforces the feeling that it's smoke and mirrors, dazzling and astounding when it's there but leaving you feeling foolish after it's packed its fancy tricks and headed off for another week.
President Josiah Bartlet's staff are still dashing round the White House, and they've all got the usual snappy lines backing up in their throats, just waiting for the perfect moment to come out.
At its best, The West Wing gives you goosebumps. This week's big moment, when President Bartlet, played by an Emmy-winning Martin Sheen, shot down a preachy, homophobic talk-show host with a little Bible-spouting of his own, was sublime.
"I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I had you here. I wanted to sell my youngest daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She's a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?"
But perhaps it's all so relentless because everybody's afraid that if they stand still and shut up for five seconds, all the doubts about the superficiality, Teflon-coated sleekness and incessant moralising will begin to rise through the gaps in the plot.
Besides the chapter-and-versifying, this week's episode was about the aftermath of an assassination attempt on the president, and about the urge to come down hard on the hate groups versus the need for personal freedom. Even a group of people with answers for everything struggled with that one, but not for long.
"What do you say about a government that goes out if its way to protect even citizens that try to destroy it?" one wondered.
"God bless America," another decided.
"God bless America," they parroted.
And God bless whoever invented the sick bag.
tvreview@irish-times.ie