|
COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"Without a Trace,"CBS's Thursday-night drama about the New York City Missing Persons Squad of the F.B.I., is one of the handful of shows to have emerged during Jerry Bruckheimer's short but impressively productive television career; better known until recently for movies like "Flashdance,” "Top Gun,"and "Pearl Harbor,"Bruckheimer is an executive producer of "C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation,” "C.S.I.: Miami,"the reality show "The Amazing Race,"and the real reality show "Profiles from the Front Line."I stopped watching "C.S.I."at the beginning of its second season, in the fall of 2001. The lines given to William Petersen, who plays the head of the forensics team, were getting more and more ponderous (you almost expected him to peel off his safety goggles and say, "It wasn't arsenic--it was beauty killed the beast”), and the murders he was trying to solve had become gratuitously grisly, or so it seemed to me in late 2001, when television-as-usual had resumed but life-as-usual had not. But the two shows do offer some of the same satisfactions: by solving crimes that often seem mind-bogglingly mysterious or downright unsolvable, the "C.S.I."team and the Missing Persons Squad of "Without a Trace"create the comforting illusion that competence--having the right tools for the job--will conquer all; they give us a handle on our chaotic,...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
