TV is the New Reading

'Women's Murder Club'

ain't no Agatha Christie

A reporter, a homicide detective, an assistant district attorney and a coroner all get together and share information to solve crimes. It’s ... reality.

Well, not really. In the case of James Patterson’s “The Women’s Murder Club,” airing Fridays at 8 p.m. on ABC, they’re also friends and roommates and ... complete strangers.

Witness the case of the intrepid reporter who manages to track down a minor clue about a meth addict biker who ... actually, now that I mention it, reminds me more than a little bit of a recent subplot in “Blood Ties,” a vampire show airing Fridays on Lifetime. Weird. Anyway, the reporter visited seven biker bars and found a photo of this biker. Which they already had. And she’s not able to control the mayor’s ill-advised press release, so what good is she? Her purpose seems to be that of someone’s pesky kid sister.

But in bringing this photo to the other three – in one of their apartments, because – oh, who can say anymore? She asks if she can join the club. And the attorney – or the cop – says “There is no club.”

James Patterson

I have to admit to bias here. I cannot stand the work of crime fiction writer James Patterson. One reason is because a lot of his characters learn and act on information they have no legitimate access to. They’re either psychic or the manipulators of a complex system of mirrors.

Also, he’s got this unrestrained villian fetish. His villians tend to be superhuman and omniscient and they’re always 20 times smarter than the investigators pursuing them, making it all but miraculous when they are brought to justice – generally at huge personal cost to the lead detective.

In this show, there’s a serial killer who’s going to out-clever them all for a good long time named The Kiss-Me-Not Killer. Perfectly legitimate series length subplot, except for a couple of realities: This group isn’t in the best position to deal with a serial killer. The homicide detective isn’t a profiler, the attorney can’t prosecute someone no one can catch, the intrepid reporter can mostly only write about him or be a target for him, and the coroner can examine his handiwork – stitching the lips of his victims closed.

So far, I’m uninterested. The Carver on “Nip/Tuck” was more interesting somehow, raping and mutilating his victims and leaving them broken and demoralized. “Jack of All Trades” from “Profiler” was superhuman and targeted his profiler specifically, but he was eventually run to earth and jailed. Kiss-Me-Not is sick and twisted but ... again, superhuman and all-knowing and for no especially satisfying reason, evil.

Story

It’s important, I suppose, that all of these characters are women. I haven’t seen any truly satisfying reason yet. From a post-millennial standpoint, the lead investigators all being women isn’t that novel. These people all working as closely together as they do and getting involved in each other’s family and dating and life situations is ... well, not completely unheard-of either.

It even feels sexist in this day and age to build a story around this situation. The suggestion implicit in the title of the show is that it’s so novel, when in fact women have been doing these jobs for decades. Heck, television has featured at least three women presidents and no major party has ever endorsed one as a candidate (the closest being Geraldine Ferraro endorsed by the Democrats as a vice presidential candidate in 1984) so in theory, the network response to this show should’ve been something like, “What else you got?”

I guess I thought this was going to be something closer to Agatha Christie’s “Tuesday Night Murder Club,” where a bunch of retired professionals came together in Miss Marple’s drawing room to talk about murder mysteries they’d encountered in their past.

No, it might not be as exciting, but I think it’d be a good nine or 10 times more interesting and, unlike this show, it’d be something I might actually stick around and watch.

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

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