It’s only a half-hour, but dull CBC series feels a lot longer

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This article was published 04/11/2003 (8294 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THERE’S nothing particularly mysterious about the current glut of cop/procedural/crime-solving shows in prime time these days.

Law & Order has been a ratings winner for more than a decade, and its nearly-as-successful spinoffs have become cornerstones of NBC’s drama lineup.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation quickly became the most-watched drama series on American television, and its east-coast clone, CSI: Miami, was one of last season’s most successful newcomers.

From Cold Squad to Cold Case, from NYPD Blue to Blue Murder, and from Dragnet to DaVinci’s Inquest, viewers have developed a real affection for shows that examine the nuts, bolts and technological how-dunit of TV-style crime-solving.

Part of it is a fascination with 21st-century investigative gadgetry. Part of it is the appeal of fictional stories that mirror actual events. None of the current wave’s popularity is a mystery.

What is perplexing, however, is why any network would seek to enter this overcrowded corner of the TV landscape with a series whose production values and storytelling style are vastly inferior to those employed by the genre’s most successful shows.

That’s the case-cracking conundrum facing 72 Hours: True Crime, a modestly budgeted new CBC series that debuts tonight at 8 on the People’s Network. As a concept, it’s fairly intriguing — a re-enactment-driven examination of perplexing real-life Canadian cases — but its execution simply isn’t up to the current crime-show standard.

The series uses a combination of dramatizations and interviews with actual detectives to revisit high-profile cases and examine how police handled each case. Tonight’s opener, titled Burning Obsession, focuses on a 1988 murder in Toronto’s Sikh community.

72 Hours: True Crime draws its title from the widely held perception that the most important part of any investigation takes place in the days immediately following a crime. “Every detective knows,” the series’ narrator intones, “that the crucial clue is always there — somewhere — in the first 72 hours.”

It’s quite puzzling, then, that the first case examined involves a murder case whose first 72 hours produced nothing of real value to police. So few clues turned up, in fact, that the investigation was eventually shut down due to a lack of evidence.

It wasn’t until six years later — or 72 MONTHS, if you’d rather — that a tip from a jailhouse informant seeking to avoid deportation gave Toronto police the break they needed to solve the case.

The title/storyline contradiction is just one of the problems that derail 72 Hours. The various crime-scene re-creations, while reasonably well executed, are obviously done on a shoestring budget and don’t add much in the way of suspense or any other sort of dramatic momentum.

And the scripting and narration are just plain dull — about the only really interesting parts of tonight’s premiere are the comments from the cops who worked the case; the rest is so criminally uninspiring that it probably merits at least 72 hours’ worth of investigation just to find out who’s to blame.

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Heavy-metal thunder: Another thing there’s no shortage of on the tube these days, thanks to imported U.S.-cable series like E! True Hollywood Story and Behind the Music, is in-depth musical/celebrity biographies.

But Canada’s arts-minded Bravo! network makes a worth contribution to the genre tonight when it premieres John Kay: Magic Carpet Ride (7 p.m. on Bravo!), a new hour-long profile of the German-born, Canadian-raised frontman of the band that literally invented heavy metal (the widely descriptive term was borrowed from a line in Steppenwolf’s mega-hit Born to be Wild).

The program takes a fascinating look back at Kay’s early years in war-torn Germany and his family’s bold escape from East Germany and subsequent move to Canada, and follows his remarkable transformation from a geeky, legally blind immigrant who spoke no English into one of the most charismatic rock performers of the 1960s and ’70s.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca