1 out of 5

Created by: Steven Bochco and Eric Lodal

Covers season 1

While it’s finale deserves note for finally getting the show’s act together, presenting its various elements with the kind of confidence and momentum that was otherwise lacking in the season, the latest Steven Bochco co-creation struggles to justify why it exists, substituting generic subplots for character building and stuffing unfortunately obvious red herrings into events to pad them out to 10 episodes.  The pitch of the show was to cover – from execution to conclusion – one single crime.  In a TV world of True Detective and the Killing and other 8 to 10-episode focused seasons, this isn’t such an unusual structure any longer, but ‘Murder’s particular crime – a young girl is murdered, obnoxious billionaire techie Erich Blunt, CEO of a fictionalized ‘it does everything’ company is the main suspect – lacks compelling investigators, or potential perpetrators, or even presentation.  Taye Diggs does the best with the available material out of the good guys, and Tom Felton’s Blunt is as despicable as he’s intended to be, both actors layering in depth that I doubt was there on the page; the rest of the cast (including our other main lead, Kathleen Robertson) are written and remain as one-emotion-to-rule-them-all entities whose job is to say a line of dialogue that nods to an expected plot beat.  Further sludging this slurry is the embarrassingly outdated tech talk.  Perhaps the show isn’t geared toward your modern computer savvy viewer, but I think by now even my parents realize that virtual reality doesn’t work like we pretended it did in 90s movies, and those who are at least 1% savvy will probably raise an eyebrow at something like ‘universal root logs.’

When the show dips into the ramifications of a high-profile case – that extended focus these season-long structures can be good for – it feels like it can turn in to something, but then it will drop back and churn us through some boring subplots while the main story spins its wheels until the final couple of episodes.  If Bochco / TNT can figure out whether they want to be a moody cable show or a typical police procedural, ‘Murder’ could have a chance at at least being entertaining.  With the setup of its first season, though, it feels way too strained to make it a valid contender amongst its peers.