MURDER IN THE FIRST

**1/2 (out of ****)

It’s time to reveal my darkest secret: I used to be a reality TV watcher. It was never that hardcore (I’ve never seen a single episode of Survivor or The Bachelor), but I didn’t completely avoid it like I do now. I mostly dabbled in VH1 shows. I couldn’t get enough of the horrible people that starred in shows whose titles ended in “of Love.” Eventually I got tired, and realized there might be better ways to spend my TV watching time. The break wasn’t easy – I had developed a need to know what was happening to Hoops and New York – but I finally went cold turkey when I came up with a simple rule: don’t ever watch a first episode. If you start watching a show like that with the eighth episode, it’s hard to find a reason to care. The first episodes were always good at setting up the premise and giving each “character” a couple moments to introduce themselves, but the real selling point – the purest heroin of the reality world – is a moment at the end, just after a voiceover says “This season on People are Garbage”. I would watch, slack-jawed, trying to figure out how each of those moments would happen, and knowing that I couldn’t miss a single episode. No one moment or episode ever lived up to that thirty second montage. So, I just wouldn’t watch it.

Watching Murder in the First, TNT’s new drama reminded me of those halcyon days of Rocks and Flavas. What it lacks in hair-pulling and sea-vomiting, it makes up for in a need for you to not just watch the first episode, but for the first episode, and its requisite “This season on Murder in the First”, to do all of the heavy lifting for the rest of its inaugural run. If you are watching a TNT drama (of which they know much, I’ve been told) in June, you are not preparing for the Emmys. You are in fact hoping that the pilot of Murder in the First grabs you in such a way that you have removed an hour of boredom from your week for the rest of the summer. And Murder in the First does have a lot of the necessary ingredients:

• reliable, if not huge, stars
• easy to follow character development
• MURDER!!!
• a knowledge of police work that seems more gleaned from other police shows than it does from actual police.
• TNT style Drama

All of these ingredients make it hard to hate. The fact that it’s totally unoriginal, and sometimes even boring, and full of exposition that takes way too long, and logic leaps by the detectives that are there to save some of the time the exposition already took up, makes it hard to like. But still, hard to hate. And Murder in the First’s gimmick is actually not bad, as far as gimmicks go. Forgoing the usual novelty of having its lead character have some sort of personality defect or brain thingy that essentially turns them into a superhero, Murder in the First will instead explore one murder for the entire first season. This is great, if the pilot hooks you, but it will kill the show if no one watches it or likes it. Much like I Love Money, my personal favorite VH1 show, no one will tune in if they’ve missed the first seven. I can’t recommend Murder in the First as quality TV, but if you were just going to spend the summer watching Law and Order reruns, you might as well watch a ten hour episode you’ve never seen before.

– Ryan Haley