THE TV COLUMN: Crime show fans get new CBS drama to love

— I have a co-worker who loves all the police procedural dramas.

She could live quite happily on a steady diet of CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, The Mentalist and Criminal Minds.

“I don’t care what the characters do at home or their relationships at work,” she says. “Just give me a good crime and get it solved in an hour.”

Evidently, there are millions of viewers just like her. They just want to be entertained with an old-fashioned cops and criminals tale where the good guys win, the curtain falls and the next cop show comes on.

It’s a simple entertainment formula that demands little of the viewer and CBS has tapped into the mother lode. All the police procedural series mentioned above are on CBS. And now there’s one more.

Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday. It’s a fast-paced spinoff of Criminal Minds and is, for all intents and purposes, a clone of the original.

The CBS thumbnail: “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior is a drama about an elite team of agents within the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) who use unconventional methods of investigation and aggressive tactics to capture the nation’s most nefarious criminals.”

By way of comparison, here’s CBS’ synopsis of Criminal Minds: “Criminal Minds revolves around an elite team of FBI profilers who analyze the country’s most twisted criminal minds, anticipating their next moves before they strike again.”

See the difference? I don’t either, except one has “nefarious” criminals and the other has “twisted.”

Joe Mantegna and Thomas Gibson are the two big names in the original, Forest Whitaker and Janeane Garofalo head the spinoff cast.

Whitaker plays intense and soulful FBI profiler Sam Cooper. He sniffs out nefarious and twisted serial killers with his uncanny intuitive abilities.

Aside: How many serial killers are actually running around out there? If we really lived in the macabre CBS world, I’d be terrified to leave the house for fear of stumbling over a half dozen bodies between my car and the office.

Whitaker tries hard to instill Cooper with a brooding persona - a man thinking deep, deep thoughts. It’s obvious the veteran actor has the chops. He won an Oscar for 2006’s The Last King of Scotland and we’ve admired his work since his debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and in Platoon (1986) and Good Morning, Vietnam in 1987.

Whitaker’s turn as Lt. Jon Kavanaugh on The Shield was one of the highlights of that memorable series. But can he sell yet another cookie-cutter cop drama? Is there room at the trough for one more?

Maybe the key to these shows’ success is that no matter how deviant the criminal, no matter how grotesque the crime, our heroes will get the needed DNA results in five minutes and use some computer mumbo jumbo and their razor-sharp intuitive abilities and all will be right with the world again by the top of the hour.

The shows are comfort food in a dark and scary world.

Others characters in Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior are John Sims (Michael Kelly), an overly passionate (he once killed a pedophile) agent; Mick Rawson (Matt Ryan), who was once in the British Special Forces; and Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness), who is the requisite “deus ex machina” computer geek - the same role she plays on Criminal Minds.

Do they need to move the plot along quickly? Have Penelope type some stuff into the magic computer and - voila! - up pops answers that would have taken Dragnet folks a month to figure out.

Garofalo portrays fairly grim FBI agent Beth Griffith and Richard Schiff (The West Wing) is FBI director Jack Fickler.

The series is in need of comic relief. Well, if not comic relief, some sort of lighter relief. Maybe Penelope will come through for us.

Program note

: Survivor: Redemption Island is up and running at 7 p.m. Wednesday on CBS. The twist: Those voted out at tribal councils then go to the island and have a chance to return to the game later.

The TV Column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. E-mail:

[email protected]

Style, Pages 22 on 02/22/2011

Upcoming Events