Birth Of A Suspicious Audience

Just got done watching the pilot episode of Lie To Me*, which became more interesting once I was able to finally remember Tim Roth's name after seeing all the ads. I like him, and there's certainly an element of behaviorism and psychology to the premise, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

On the one hand, I like the dialog, the characters and the underlying psychology. By comparison, one of the things that bugged the crap out of me the one time I watched Bones was the cookie-cutter supporting cast. Kelli Williams has a nice quirkiness about her, and while the new recruit who is part of the infinitesimal fraction of the population who's just good at identifying liars is a bit of a stretch, I'm okay with that for now. "Radical honesty" guy fills the requisite Shaggy role for any successful Scooby gang, that being mostly comic relief.

They've got a nice office with nice stuff -- which was my other problem with Bones -- but if they're good at what they do, that's not so surprising.

And therein lies (get it?) one of the problems. In that first episode, they're too good at what they do. There seems to be an emerging class of television drama that's all about geniuses, sort of a Jessica Fletcher renaissance of infallible investigators. It seems to have started with House, M.D., or maybe Monk. I'm sure we'll learn that Tim Roth's character is flawed in some way, but he's still getting set up to almost always be right, and where's the fun in that?

The fun in that may be the second problem, actually. I don't know if I care enough to research this, but if the "analysis" of facial expressions and body language is at all based in fact (and it sounds almost plausible enough for that to be the case), and the show takes off, everybody and their brother is going to start trying to figure out if people are lying in everyday life. Especially when the inevitable special interest stories start popping up on your local Fox news affiliate. Not sure if that's a good idea, but now that we've been told that we're in an America of hope and change instead of fear and suspicion, maybe we can get past it.