LITTLE ROCK — BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Here's an original idea for a TV series. Let's have murders and get a hero to solve them.
Nah. Been done 487 times before. What can we do to spice it up and put a new twist on the trite old formula?
How about a team of four crime-busters who pool their talents to, well, bust crimes? If that sounds too Scooby gang for you, let's make our heroes ... women!
What ABC has done with Women's Murder Club is adapt James Patterson's best-selling book series for the small screen. The results premiere at 8 p.m. Friday.
Our four hard-sleuthing ladies are:
Angie Harmon (Law & Order) as San Francisco police detective Lt. Lindsay Boxer.
She has an ex-husband, but they're still friends. Friends with, um, benefi ts.
Paula Newsome (The Lyon's Den) as police medical examiner Dr. Claire Washburn.
She's happily married.
Aubrey Dollar (Point Pleasant) as Cindy Thomas, feisty young newspaper crime reporter looking for her big break.
Laura Harris: (Dead Like Me) as Assistant District Attorney Jill Bernhardt. She has a frosty facade but a warm heart.
These crime-solving gals are each at the top of their professions. The show is part procedural, but largely character-driven with personal problems slopping all over into their professional careers.
Harmon is chief among equals in this ensemble. It'll be interesting to see if she can recapture the Law & Order magic in a show that relies on character. Her old series prides itself on keeping character development to a minimum.
The cast and producers, with Patterson via satellite,met with TV critics in California this summer to chat up the series. Producer Sarah Fain wants viewers to fi rst realize that these women "have full lives."
"They are not just people delivering exposition about a case," she said in a thinly veiled reference to Harmon's old show. "We really want them to be fully fl eshed-out, rounded characters who have flaws and who have tremendous promise and have complications and great fun."
"We don't want them to be women trying to be men in a men's world," writer/producer Liz Craft added. "They are women being themselves that happen to be women in a man's world."
Patterson, who serves as executive producer, gave his blessing to the scripts he'd seen.
"I grew up in a house full of women," he said. "My mother, grandmother, three sisters, two female cats, and Aunt Bella, who is still in my head. And I think Liz and Sarah have really gotten it down great."
What will be the show's appeal? Is it a fugitive from the Lifetime channel? Will men find it rewarding to wade through all this estrogen as well? Harmon gave it a shot.
"We each, like, have relationships," Harmon said. "Actually, the story is kind of basically about that - how our jobs coincide with what we have going on in our personal lives.
"For example, my character, she's great at her job. She's horrible at her life. I mean - and there is a man character for me, and there is a man character for her. And, like, all four of us have, you know, the men in our lives." There you have it. Four strong crime-bustin' women, each with her own "man character." Sounds like the total package to me.
Women's Murder Club is up against the new vampire drama Moonlight on CBS, the docu-drama Nashville on Fox and the brilliant but under-appreciated Friday Night Lights on NBC.
If you're man enough, there's always Smackdown "rasslin'" on the CW.
HomesArkansas, Pages 161 on 10/07/2007