By Scott Buckner
Jeff Goldblum. A cop show where dead people help an off-kilter cop solve the crimes that killed them. I knew I was in for something a week or so ago when I saw the trailers for Goldblum’s new NBC show Raines, which debuted last night – except I didn’t know exactly what because, uh, it’s a show involving Jeff Goldblum. If there’s anyone on the face of the planet who can sit down at a kitchen table with a Buddhist monk and turn a simple game of Uno or Battleship into a rambling contemplation of man vs. nature. vs. himself vs. the Milton Bradley game company, it’s Jeff Goldblum. And ultimately, the monk will resort to self-immolation as his only way out.
This is exactly why Jeff Goldblum’s house has become the only one in the galaxy that Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t bother with.
Anyway, I was thinking that maybe Raines would be an interesting hour of TV because I’m a bit partial to Medium, which is another one of NBC’s shows where – instead of going into the light – the dead loiter around to help some off-kilter law enforcement representative solve the crimes that killed them. But it’s not. It’s just another excuse to let Goldblum ramble about with that incessant, just-above-monotone drone of his for nearly an hour. Except now he does it looking like an undertaker. Jeez, when even Raines’ psychotherapist goes telling him to stop wasting her time so she might do her nails instead, it’s not a good sign for anybody.
But I digress. Goldblum portrays Michael Raines, a detective in some town with a whole lot of Mexicans and a beach where you can talk to your murdered-detective partner Charlie as he sits atop a concrete Green Giant-sized spool of thread with all sorts of hieroglyphs on it.
Raines’ boss, Captain Lewis, is clearly concerned about him since Charlie was popped in some sort of activity gone wrong, hence the need for intervention by the department shrink. Lewis recounts Raines’ history by equating the Raines-Charlie partnership with that of famed American explorers Lewis and Clark after the famous explorers parted company upon answering the question of whether you’d sail off the edge of the Earth once you reached the Pacific Ocean. “Lewis didn’t have Clark to take care of him,” explains Lewis while checking the status of the eBay bids on memorabilia once belonging to his old explorer friend Clark. “So Lewis killed himself. Raines doesn’t have Charlie.”
Anyway, it’s not even 20 minutes into the show and the Raines dead-visitor count is up to something like five Mexicans and one white dude with a disintegrating face singing the opening two lines to the 1970s Fritos Frito Bandito corn chip jingle:
“Ay yi-yi-yi
I am the Frito Bandito
I love Frito corn chips I love them I do
I love Frito corn chips, I steal them from you!”
Really.
Anyway, Goldblum explains the basic difference between Raines and Medium like this: In Medium, Patricia Arquette’s visiting murder-victim ghosts are real. In Raines, Goldblum’s murder-victim ghosts are hallucinations that are “all in my mind; they’re figments of my imagination that I know.” So the question is, basically, are they actual spirits, or are they the embodiment of something plucked from the stream of Raines’ subconscious that, in disguise, are really just a slice of Raines’ brain helping Raines solve the crime?
See what happens when you spend an hour with Jeff Goldblum, even when he’s just background noise while you’re paying attention to other things instead? You end up rambling aloud just like him.
At any rate, I half-paid attention enough to this show to know that Raines solves the crime – of course – with the help of his Mexican dead-folk visitors. This must piss off everyone else in the precinct, because solving crimes with the help of dead people who were actually there is a lot easier than beating the streets for clues and scumbag perps.
Otherwise, the only other notable thing about Raines is Nicole Sullivan sleepwalking her way through the role of some sort of police department employee playing a fish-out-of-water comic actress who was far more interesting playing a retarded girl named Antionia on MadTV.
Anyone paying close enough attention may have noticed the writers playing the intelligence card early by interjecting trivia that President Lyndon B. Johnson had Fresca on tap at the White House. They also scored with – I’m taking a guess here – a reference to Goldblum’s role of Seth Brundle in The Fly with the line, “I don’t like flies. Flies are a nuisance.”
It may also have occurred to anyone else paying close attention that Raines returns next week in its permanent Friday night time slot of 8 p.m. Central. This allows the programming geniuses at NBC keep their jobs for another few months, because nobody in America is home at 8:00 on Fridays to watch anything on ABC or CBS either.
*
This was bothering me for the longest time, but last night I finally figured out the pedigree behind NBC’s always-impressive My Name Is Earl on Thursday nights. That lineage is as close as the nightly back-to-back reruns of Becker on local hometown favorite WCIU-TV.
Becker, which died a slow and somewhat undeserved death soon after Terry Farrell abandoned her role as diner owner Reggie Kostas – and left Shawnee Smith’s highly remarkable rack to hold the chick eye-candy bag all by itself – was the first show in TV history to make obvious fun of the blind every week and get away with it. Earl makes obvious fun of the white-trash blind, crippled, and crazy every week and gets away with it.
Last night’s first Becker rerun was the Christmas episode “Santa On Ice,” featuring a department store Santa dying in Dr. John Becker’s office on Christmas Eve in front of a bunch of kids, a party-bound morgue worker (played by the always-creepy Michael J. Pollard) using the refrigerated drawers that hold the stiffs to chill the party beer and shrimp bowl, and a lesson why it’s not a wise move to transport a live Christmas tree crosstown via subway and taxi.
*
I’m writing this column to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno as background noise because I was too occupied to change the channel after Raines. His musical guest is some dude named Paolo Nutini. Add equal parts of Bob Dylan’s slurring incoherence with whatever the fuck is wrong with Joe Cocker and you have some dude singing a song about new shoes.
Some nights I stay up far too late for my own good.
*
Check out the What I Watched Last Night collection, including recent dispatches on Supersize She, Miami Inked, The Riches, October Road, and The Sarah Silverman Program.
Posted on March 23, 2007