TV is the New Reading

'Raines' is dark, somewhat quirky but mostly straightforward profiler show

Sometimes all it takes is a shift in perspective.

It’s just weird when the shifted perspective comes from the exact same point of view.

“Raines” features Jeff Goldblum as Michael Raines, an intriguingly mad detective. His personal brand of insanity is, so far as I can figure it, unique in crime drama and possibly detective fiction.

Upon arriving on a crime scene, he sees dead people. But only because his mind projects the dead people as hallucinatory presences. They’re not ghosts so much as they’re figments of his improbably active imagination, and they change over the course of his investigation as he learns more about them and tries to make sense of what he’s learning and also to solve the crime.

This storyline works because Goldblum is just freaky weird anyway. He’s got an amiable darkness to him that works for this sort of character. He can deliver horrifying lines in a way that you know his character is joking, but you’re not altogether certain that he is. For example, his supervisor recently asked him why he was so opposed to seeing a shrink – he’d lost his partner (who he also sees occasionally), so there are steps he needs to take to get fully reinstated.

Instantly his face twists diabolically and his voice is a cross between Peter Lorre, Jim Carrey and Gollum from Middle Earth: “But I have secrets, dark and horrible secrets.”

It’s hilarious and disturbing at the same time.

It might seem like this loon shouldn’t be out in public and carrying a sidearm, but from my perspective, this is perfectly straightforward storytelling – especially for detective fiction. It’s pure victimological profiling. The investigator arrives on the scene, examines the body and the situation and starts drawing a few tentative conclusions.

The conversation with the corpse over the course of the next hour is simply the detective trying to understand what’s happening and talking it out.

Sure, it’s a little freaky to visualize them so well and to interact with them, but the show so far has played fair. The dead people haven’t pointed to drawers Raines needs to open to discover vital clues or imparted any new information he wasn’t finding out anyway.

More than an investigative tool, the images seem to serve the function of a Greek chorus, projections of a humanizing compulsion to discover the truth. The verse in Genesis 4:10 is “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” As Raines processes the loss of life in the figures of these murder victims, he is the more motivated to pursue their murderers.

And if he seems a little bit nuts in the meanwhile, small price to pay.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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