Hail TV!

I enjoy the "formulaic" or "procedural" American dramas - stuff like CSI (original, Miami and New York), Without A Trace, House - you get the idea. Most of these (save WoT) are on Channel Five here, which unless we watch it through Sky is a bit of a snowy picture...

The premise is that the program is based more on the procedure. For example:

1) CSI - crime committed, evidence collected, evidence analysed, suspects questioned, wrong avenues explored, breakthrough, crime solved.

2) House - Someone falls ill with unexplained illness. Dr. Gregory House gets involved. Is rude to all involved, upsets family. Usually whiteboard produced for "differential diagnosis". First diagnosis seems to be correct, but ultimately makes things worse. Few more false starts, then unlikely solution arrived at, patient nursed back to health. Mostly.

3) Without a Trace. Whiteboard again. The person has, in fact, left "a trace" so they get found. (I have one problem with WoT and that's the memory of Anthony LaPaglia in "Frasier" with the worst accent ever ever ever - worse than Dick van Dyke in "Mary Poppins" - AND he should have been from Manchester and he won a blinkin Emmy for it and ......[sniiiiiip]).

I like these because they "do what they say on the tin". They're also not as procedural as claimed - in CSI we find out about Grissom's background slowly, his hearing loss is revealed in bits early on - but no big reveal. In House, we know he is a big grump with a bad leg and a dependency on self-medication, but slowly we find out more about this until one big reveal episode. So there is some humanity there as well, but it's more like being at work where you find about people in fits and starts - and some people you may never know.

Adam Faith's last words were (allegedly) "Channel Five's all shit, isn't it?" Not quite all, Adam.