IHAO on ... Lie to Me

Tim Roth is a pretty good actor.  He's great in Resevoir Dogs and Musketeer, I liked him in Incredible Hulk, and he is pretty much the best part of Four Rooms.  He does a very good job as Guildenstern (a part I am chomping at the bit to play myself) and The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover is super good with him in it, too.  He's a real good actor.  And he is the lead for this really different crime procedural show!  Well, it started really differerent ...

Just like Bones is based on an actual anthropologist's work, hence its focus on social structures ... except for the episodes with stupid babies or serial killers or other inane plots that made me stop watching that show, Lie to Me is based on an actual doctor of lies.  My wife is a professional therapist, and she has read, and I think we even own, one of the books the real dude that Tim Roth's character is based on, one of that dude's books.  And just like Bones, Lie to Me very very quickly stops being unique and starts just being all the interrogation and talking parts of a crime procedural, without any of the crime.

The first season, though ... that is great!  Complicated, difficult, interesting, thoughtful, really really cool.  I could completely and without any regrets advise everyone to watch it, streaming on Netflix right now!  But slowly and surely, the show loses everything that made it good, and became just "crime of the week."

Not only that, though, the show lost its Pzazz!  Is that how that is spelled?  I dunno, whatever.  There was a way they shot the show, a way that things were told, that the story unfolded, that was just completely dropped.  And that sucked the most.  All the science was incredibly interesting, and they replace it with ... arguing with ex-wives as b-plots and a-plots that are just crimes.  The show becomes everything I hate about crime procedurals.

But season 1!

Sad.

I've been watching a lot of TV recently.  Mostly it is on in the background while I write or work on other things, like cleaning, or cooking, or counting the number of pronouns in paragraphs for .5 cents a paragraph.  I guess I'm going to keep talking about TV shows.  That way I can finally get all my ... thoughts ... about Psych out.