If all this sounds terribly silly, it’s for a good reason. “Moonlight” attempts to drape a cop show over an Anne Rice-style gothic framework, and totally fails. It succeeds with laughs, though. It is, hands down, the funniest show of the new fall season. All the humor is unintentional, but it’s hard to totally pan a show that packs as many gut-busting moments as “Moonlight,” whether it means to or not.
St. John has a vampire buddy named Josef (Jason Dohring) who shares St. John’s concern about a rash of recent “vampire-style” killings in Los Angeles. Tabloid reporter Beth Turner (Sophia Myles) is hot on the trail of the murderers, which lands her Mick’s path. There’s an instant chemistry between them—at least, you know that’s what it says in the script, though it didn’t translate to the screen. Beth vaguely recognizes Mick. What’s their connection? It’s worth staying to the end to find out, because it’s screamingly funny in a sick-and-wrong Farrelly Brothers kind of way. But just about everything on this show is—even the tiniest throwaway scenes are laughably absurd. In one scene Beth’s editor Maureen (Tami Roman, a “Real World” alumna) pops over to her desk to give her the great news: her story about actual vampires killing people in Los Angeles is getting tons of Web traffic. Hmmm, ya think?
“Moonlight’s” sheer camp value bears a striking resemblance to that of the old “Beauty and the Beast” series with Linda Hamilton, and with good reason: both were created by Ron Koslow. Koslow has a gift for combining romance, mystery and supernatural elements with a self-seriousness that creates comic gold. And, wisely, CBS has scheduled “Moonlight” right after “Ghost Whisperer,” which is entering its third season of Jennifer Love Hewitt communicating with ghosts who improbably give her direct eye contact without wandering down to her cleavage. And NBC has the nerve to promote their “Comedy Night Done Right.”
Women’s Murder Club ABC, 9:00 ET, premieres Oct. 12 Don’t get your hopes up: “Women’s Murder Club” is about a group of women who solve murders, not a group of women who commit them. But while the show doesn’t deliver on that expectation, it exceeds most others. Considering its source material—the pulpy, pedestrian novels of James Patterson—and the fact that it’s one of three new “Sex and the City”-style shows about powerful career women, “Murder Club” is surprisingly brisk and engrossing.
Angie Harmon plays Lindsay Boxer, an up-and-coming detective who teams with three women in adjacent fields to help each other crack murder cases. Paula Newsome is Claire, the medical examiner, Laura Harris is Jill Bernhardt, the assistant district’s attorney and Aubrey Dollar is Cindy, the newspaper reporter. The four get together to compare notes when Lindsay catches a homicide case and contribute their expertise to solve the crime, while occasionally digressing into dishy conversations about their love lives. It’s just like a book club, except that you have to read case files before each meeting.
The concept isn’t executed in quite as fun a manner as it could have been. They take their work seriously, so there isn’t a single in-joke about the novelty of their morbid spin on the knitting circle.
But “Murder Club” has one thing that’s lacking from the other power-buddy shows, and that’s honest-to-goodness chemistry. When these four women get together there’s an ease and a harmony in their interactions that doesn’t feel the least bit contrived, even when the conversation they’re having does. The four actresses maneuver around each other brilliantly, and by the end of the pilot they’ve cohered. Harmon is perfectly cast, as is Harris, who has an oddly expressionless face that works to her advantage here. But the real gem is Newsome, whom you’ll vaguely recognize from her dozens of guest appearances. She plays each scene just right, knowing when to play and when to underplay. Keep one eye on her, and the others on this show.
