KILLER WOMEN

** (out of ****)

It’s hard to hate Killer Women as much as we’ve been told we should, or as much as it makes you want to at times. Just two weeks in, ABC essentially canceled it and replaced it with Mind Games, which is set to debut in a week or so. It’s been pretty universally panned by critics, with almost everyone collectively deciding that it’s just fucking dumb. And they’re right. It is fucking dumb. But the question is (or would have been, had the show continued) is Killer Women capable of staying on the right, fun side of dumb.

There are two killer women in this show, but only one is a cast member, so I’m not sure how they are going to justify the plural title every week. Does she only go after female murderers? That’s the wrong kind of stupid. Anyway, Tricia Helfer plays Molly Parker, a GIRL Texas Ranger. There aren’t a lot of girl Texas Rangers, apparently. Molly is in the middle of a divorce, and has moved in with her sister and her family. She is sleeping with some other cop-like person, who she tries to get information out of. She’s motivated by nothing other than justice. She won’t stop until the bad guys are in jail and the good guys are safe at home. I know how boring this sounds, but there are a couple of things Killer Women has (would have had) going for it.

This show does have a sense of style, or a complete lack of a sense of style. It wants to be western – not just a western, but a TV western – but it’s not sure the era of western it wants to be. What we end up with is a mishmash of cheese. Almost comically so. I don’t think that’s necessarily the aim of the show, but I do think that it wants to stay light hearted. So it works…kind of.

It also has found a way to make the blandness of its lead character okay. First of all, they cast Tricia Helfer. I’ve never seen Battlestar, so I had no idea what she was capable of before I watched this, but she can totally handle her own show. Now that Killer Women is dust, maybe a good network will build a show around her. Matched with that is the fact that she’s a female Texas Ranger. That’s probably a hard life. Most shows who make a character’s gender the central focus of the character suck. Having The Woman, or The Gay Guy, or The Black Guy, or The Jewish Guy is not a good sign for a show. But here, it’s integral. Killer Women could have treaded water on the character front if it just showed us what a woman in the Rangers would have to go through. I don’t know, like locker room bullshit. It’s like a fun, less self-important G.I. Jane.

It’s not so good that anyone should be sad to see it go so soon. It was doomed. We know all about how ABC dramas work, thanks to Tuesday’s article, and ABC dramas trend downward, not up. That leaves them with no patience to see if a drama could figure itself out. And Killer Women had so much to figure out that it was a lost cause right away. But hey, Tricia Helfer got pushed back to the forefront, so it can’t be all bad.

– Ryan Haley