TV Review: Body of Proof – Pilot

[bookzombie]

Summary

Megan Hood used to be a neurosurgeon, but after being in a car accident, nerve damage means that she cannot continue to pursue her original career so works as a medical examiner. Her forthright and arrogant manner puts her in conflict with both her colleagues and the police.

Verdict

A fairly typical glossy US detective series with some promise, but let down by cliched characterisation. Spoilers ahead.

Putting together a pilot episode must be a difficult task, it has to introduce the characters, the relationships between them and the sort of stories the series wants to tell. Sometimes a series will hit the ball running – in my book the pilot episode of The West Wing is a pitch-perfect idea of it done right – and sometimes it takes a few episodes to get it right. Maybe Body of Proof will be the latter, but it’s got a fight on its hands.

The main problem is that Megan Hunt is really not an easy character to like. The success of House seems to have a led to a whole new string of unpleasant, arrogant leading characters (Shark, Lie to Me) of which this is just the latest. Megan waltzes onto crime scenes, immediately tells everyone around her how they are wrong and is herself proved to be right.

Maybe it is familiarity, but this particular character trope is starting to get rather tiresome. Shark‘s cancellation after two seasons was no surprise, and while I liked Lie to Me, I did wonder whether it really had legs. House got away with it, at least in the early seasons, due mainly to being funny – there’s a kind of  hand-over-the-mouth shock humour in people saying out loud the things that most people would keep inside their heads, but it should have been cancelled three or four years ago (but that’s a post for another time!) There’s no evidence thus far that Hunt has any sort of sense of humour at all – apart from a certain smug ‘told you so’ smile which gets trying.

She also treats her immediate superior with contempt, for no other reason than he’s a bit of a plodder and is worried about departmental overspending on unnecessary tests. Which is part of his job.

You also get the family cliches – Megan is divorced with a teenaged daughter who blames her for the break-up and Megan is trying, with the help of her level-headed and wise partner (Peter, a ‘medico-legal investigator’ – is this a real thing?), to connect with again. You have the head of department who tries to give Megan enough rope while still protecting the deparment (the always watchable Jeri Ryan, unfortunately playing almost exactly the same character as she did in Shark.) and the testy chief detective (John Carroll Lynch, another reliable character actor.)

One positive thing I will give the programme: they have not gone for the improbably young lead actor, who would in no way have the experience to be the expert in the job they do (a problem that I always had with Bones): Dana Delaney is in her mid-fifties. Okay this is tv so she is a very glamorous mid-fifties but it is good to see.

There are also some story-telling flaws in this episode. A young woman is murdered while out jogging and is found to have recently had sex. But there is no active sperm found in the samples, so the conclusion is that the man has had a vascectomy. Thus far okay. However, the immediate follow-up is that therefore she must have been having an affair with a married man, as only a married man who didn’t want any, or more, children would have the operation. Okay, that may be one conclusion but just off the top of my head I can think of four other possibilities:

1. The man is divorced
2. The man is a widower
3. It could be a single, sexually active man who didn’t want to risk an unwanted pregnancy (probably would have to be above a certain age before a doctor agreed to the operation, if the US is anything like the UK in this respect)
4. The man may have had low motility for medical reasons (less likely but shouldn’t be ruled out)

I know that there is only 40 minutes to tell the story, but this is just clumsy writing.

Also, the next action is to go visit one of the top specialists in vascectomies to see if they can link one of their clients to someone involved in the case. Seriously, in the US do you have specialists that the rich go to to get their snip? In the UK it’s a routine operation requiring a certain amount of care, sure, but it’s not brain surgery!

Of course, unless you really loathe a show,  it’s unfair to judge a series by the first episode and I will probably give it a couple more to see if it settles in. I really want to like it and there are far too few programmes around with competent female lead characters. I’ve now watched the second episode and it at least seems to be giving the secondary cast more of a role.

But honestly, I am just getting tired of the ‘genius who can get away with obnoxious behavour because they’re a genius’ lead characters. I have worked with people like this and they are a nightmare. Give me an ensemble and teamwork any day.

Originally published at Books, Bytes & Other Bits. Please leave any comments there.