Raines
NBC
Thursdays 10 p.m. / 9 p.m. Central

Concept for new cop drama: a police detective who solves crimes without giving a good goddamn about the victims. No empathy whatsoever. Bottom line: getting home in time for a hot dinner.

The Wire comes fairly close. Its police protaganists have a lot on their minds: unforgiving superiors, bewildering crime statistics, an unwinnable war on drugs. Pretty far down the list: the inner emotional lives of crime victims. Sometimes the actual details of police work get in the way of weeping and wailing over the travails of whoever it was who actually got shot, or bludgeoned, or thrown over a railing in order to make it look like a suicide.

Raines is not a step forward on this front. In fact, it's a major step in the opposite direction. The show's protaganist, Detective Michael Raines of the Los Angeles Police Department, doesn't merely empathize with the dead; he carries on long, involved, sometimes heart-wrenching dialogues with them.

But Raines, as portrayed by ancient elite veteran actor Jeff Goldblum, is strangely schlock free. Far-from the ripped-from-the-headlines and/or computerized bullet trajectory dumbassery of the CSI and Law & Order mega-franchises, Raines is a tightly strung ball of acerbic wit and sordid crime.

And, in a significant step forward from shows which erroneously suggest that chatting up the dead actually yields useful information, the dearly departed in Raines are clearly mere figments of the detective's imagination. As such, they change as Raines — informed by very non-supernatural, tangible clues — gains more information and revises his understanding of the case.

Raines fills a niche. With the possible exception of Veronica Mars, old-school noir is not much in evidence on modern-day television. You've got magical psychic cops, wise-cracking fake psychic cops, cops with OCD disorder, and cops who open each episode of CSI: Miami with a groan-inducing wisecrack composed, apparently, by a gag writer canned from the team behind Van Wilder. But not a whole lot of old-school hardboiled crime-solving.

The premise of Raines sets some high hurdles for its writers. Will his condition worsen? Will it be alleviated, thus leading to a breakdown in his crime solving process? To what extent is his mental illness (or quirky personality, if you want to view it through a benign lens) inextricably linked with his ability as a detective? Goldblum's got the dramatic firepower to seize whatever terrain the writers stake out.

So he's a little involved with the victims. Raines is also bitter, scarred, funny, and on top of his game. In his case, it's utterly forgivable — and good TV.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)