detective

Must be Columbo week here at TV Squad. Yesterday I talked about some Columbo trivia, and today comes news that they are starting to release the movies made from 1989 and beyond.

The movies from 1989 will be released on April 24. They include Columbo Goes To The Guillotine (with Anthony Andrews), Murder, Smoke, and Mirrors (Fisher Stevens), Grand Deceptions (Robert Foxworth), Sex and the Married Detective (Lindsay Crouse), and Murder: A Self Portrait (Patrick Bauchau). The set will be three discs and probably won't have many (if any) extras on them.

The movies aren't as good as the regular series movies from the late 60s and the 70s (though I like the Andrews episode, where he plays a murderous magician). They just aren't as clever as the older shows were, though a few from the 90s were pretty fun. Those will (hopefully) be released later in the year.

Raines is the new quirky detective drama starring Jeff Goldblum. It's going to premiere in the Thursday at 10pm slot that ER currently occupies (side note: why was last night's ER a repeat when the rest of NBC's lineup was brand new?). The two episodes will air on March 15th and 30th. The show then goes into its regular time slot, Friday nights at 9pm.

Goldblum plays a detective that "sees" the victims of murder and they help him solve the crime. Now, contrary to earlier reports, these aren't ghosts a la Ghost Whisperer or Medium. These are actually hallucinations that the detective is seeing, but they help him piece together the puzzle of the crime. Yes, it sounds like the guy is legally insane, but he solves crimes.

The show will co-star Matt Craven, Linda Park, Madeleine Stowe, and Remi Boyer.

(S02E04) Sadness is nature's spankings. - Clay Puppington

Those of us who have been watching Moral Orel since the beginning know that the show is more complex than it appears on the surface. The inner tensions within his own family and the other grown ups in Moralton were hinted at in the first season and have come more into focus this season. I'm not a television writer, but I imagine trying to meld the funny and the emotional into an eleven-minute amalgam can't be easy, which is why I think the "slow reveal" approach has worked so well for Moral Orel. In this episode, when Orel finds out his mother might have another family, the scene doesn't feel like it was suddenly sprung on us out of nowhere, because Bloberta's unhappiness and detachment has been part of the show's subtext since it first aired a year ago.

The Dresden Files, which debuts on the Sci Fi Channel in January, sounds somewhat like The X-Files in the way it combines detective work with the supernatural. In this case, however, the detective has supernatural powers himself. The new series, based on the novels by Jim Butcher, focuses on Harry Dresden (Paul Blackthorne), a professional wizard who helps solve cases involving vampires, werewolves and other mystical creatures. Terrence Mann also stars as Dresden's sidekick, a centuries-old spirit who lives inside a human skull.

An interesting concept, at least, though I wonder what this series will have that will set it apart from other supernatural shows, many of which have not been able to find an audience. That being said, I'd rather see a wizard helping police solve crimes than another series about some psychic doing the same. The further we get from vindicating so-called "real" psychics with fictional dramas the happier I'll be. Besides, I have several leprechaun friends who have been trying to sell a script to HBO for years. I think it's about their time to shine.

Former Thief star Malik Yoba will return to TV on the new Jeff Goldblum drama for NBC, Raines. He'll play the former partner of Goldblum's detective character.

Oh, what's this one about? It's about a guy who solves crimes by...speaking to the dead! What an original concept!

Seriously, what's up with that? Medium isn't enough? And Ghost Whisperer? And doesn't the guy on The Dead Zone see people who are dead? Heck, even the blonde on Cold Case sees a "ghost" of the victim at the end of every episode.

I don't remember Columbo or Banacek or Barnaby Jones having to talk to the dead to solve crimes.

USA Network's new series Psych has proven to be quite popular. In fact, it had the highest-rated debut for a scripted series on basic cable this year. NBC will be bringing two episodes of the series to the network on August 7 and August 14, so if you don't have cable and have been wondering what all the noise surrounding the show is about, this'll be your chance. The episode "Spellingg Bee" will air on August 7 and "Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Piece" will air on August 14, both at 9 p.m. The show follows the adventures of Shawn Spencer, an intuitive man with a keen sense of observation who tricks authorities into believing he's psychic so they'll hire him to help solve cases.

(S01E03) Writers are the most shameless, self-centered bastards in the world. We lie, we seduce, we'll steal your soul. Anything to look good on the page. -Sam Landry

I thought I had read every story from Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and I might have, but nothing about "Umney's Last Case" was familiar when I read it just recently. Nevertheless, it's not a bad story, and it's also very "meta" as the college kids like to say.

In the story, as in the TV adaptation, we begin in the 1930s where a grizzled private eye named Clyde Umney is leading a storybook life that he'll soon learn is more "storybook" than he realizes. He wields snappy dialogue with the precision of a trapeze artist, and always knows just what to say to get what he wants, at one point managing to turn two women to jelly in his office one after the other.