Tim Minear

THE KILLING FIELDS

Two women lay down the law in Los Angeles.

The new Fox Wednesday-night drama, “The Inside,” about an F.B.I. profiler whose own personal history makes her all too suited for the job, wastes no time playing its trump card-and that card is not the profiler. It’s Peter Coyote, in the role of Virgil Webster, her boss at the Violent Crimes Unit in Los Angeles-an unsmiling, manipulative man with what would pass in polite company for a cruel streak. Coyote has always had a strong presence on the screen, both in movies and on TV. He didn’t start acting until he was almost forty-he was, and still is, a broadly engaged political activist-and perhaps his full life as a human being is what makes him seem so grounded as a performer. He comes across as not needing the attention the camera provides, and so the camera willingly gives it to him. He’s a tall, trim tree, and still good-looking at sixty-two. And then, tying it all together, there’s that voice: it’s measured and sane yet passionate, serious but not stern or judgmental, warm but not gooey-and, amazingly, though Coyote couldn’t possibly be unaware of the persuasive power of his instrument, he doesn’t seem to be in love with the sound of it. Television advertisers know that you would buy anything from this man: in addition to the dozens of narrations Coyote has done for documentaries and live TV broadcasts, he has had a very successful career doing commercial voice-overs.

Still, Coyote’s credibility can take a project only so far, and, in the case of “The Inside,” that’s not far enough. Oddly for a show that is all about figuring out people’s real identities, “The Inside” appropriates its own identity from an outside source, taking much of its tone and substance from “The Silence of the Lambs.” (“Chinatown,” of course, continues to influence almost every TV show that’s set in Los Angeles: the agents in “The Inside” work in the Hollis Mulwray Federal Building, a reference to the good guy in that movie, the engineer whose incorruptibility leads to his murder.) Like Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling in “Silence,” Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols) is a single woman who is devoted to her job, and who clearly bears psychic wounds from childhood that are deeper than the ones the rest of us struggle with. Nichols looks more than a little like a young Foster, too, with her straight blond hair, her somewhat childlike toothiness, and a direct gaze that conveys an essential inwardness.

The story in the first episode, which airs June 8th, also echoes “Silence.” At the beginning of the show, a woman is found dead in a dark, abandoned house that’s about to be demolished, her hands “degloved,” as the investigators say-a word describing all too vividly the stripping of the skin from the flesh-and her face half sliced off, as if the killer’s work had been interrupted. Horribly, the victim this time is an agent who was part of the team investigating a string of similar killings. Locke is brought in from Washington, D.C., to replace the dead agent, and she gets no welcome from her new colleagues: Paul Ryan (Jay Harrington, late of the WB’s “Summerland”), Danny Love (Adam Baldwin), and the jauntily named Melody Sim (Katie Finneran, who won a Tony three years ago for her performance in the revival of “Noises Off”).The only one who is even nominally friendly is Ryan, who’s cynical about Webster, and tells Locke that each one of them is there only because he or she has something that Webster lacks. What Ryan has, according to him-and unlike Webster-is “a conscience.” It’s not clear what Love has to offer, other than scowls and sarcasm; when Locke offers an unlikely theory about the killing, he actually calls her Clarice Starling to her face. Sim, in the first three episodes, is underused, though something of her personality bursts through in the third, when she dubs a man who has been obsessively identifying potential serial killers, and then killing them before they can do any harm, a “pre-filer.” Webster takes note of the neologism, and she brightens and says, “You like? That’s mine.” Later in the show, when someone else uses the word, she mouths something similar to him, again showing pride of ownership. This is one of the few times in “The Inside” when you can actually see the lust for the chase, the will to win, that is at least part of what drives the agents. Ryan and Love sulk around, complaining about Webster, and Ryan takes on, unsolicited, the role of Locke’s protector. He finds out her secret in the first episode: when she was ten, she was abducted-taken from her bedroom at night-and held captive for eighteen months before she managed to escape.

So Locke is wounded, and because of it, according to Webster, not simply more sensitive but more skillful, better at her job. (Webster also believes that the dead agent’s illness-she suffered from bipolar disorder-was part of the reason that she was good at what she did.) Ryan accuses Webster of taking advantage of Locke’s vulnerability, and he responds with angry self-justification: “This girl has a gift, Paul, forged in pain. And she wants me to use her.” These lines, forged in tin, betray the possibly fatal flaw of “The Inside”: it makes too easy an equation between people’s talents and their pain. You’d expect a top F.B.I. agent in 2005 to be a little more sophisticated.

Locke herself comes across as more blank than introspective-someone whose words are the product not of rumination but of writers. (The creators of the show, and two of its writers, are Tim Minear, who was a writer and producer on “Angel,” and Howard Gordon, who was a writer and producer on “The X-Files” and “24.”) In the first episode, when Locke is, at last, face to face with the killer, and he threatens her while explaining the deranged thinking behind his modus operandi-he’s intent on exposing the falseness of the dreams that bring young women to Los Angeles-she says, “The joke’s on you. I was made a nobody a long time ago, and by something a hell of a lot scarier than you.” Here Locke is out of control, abasing herself before a psychopath who preys on vulnerable women, and then getting all up in his face, in the space of one sentence. Her gift fails her when she needs it most. She’s just been fired from this new job (or so she thinks), and her dejection has erased her professionalism. This hardly ever happens to men on TV shows who have dangerous jobs to do; they may screw up, but not because they’re bummed out. Minear and Gordon have created a supposedly independent woman who is sought out for her skill, and yet in every one of the first three episodes she ends up being a damsel in distress, waiting for a knight in body armor to rescue her.

This is the time of year when I begin to see a long, gleaming line of gin-and-tonics stretching to the horizon, but programmers at TV networks see things a little differently-to them, apparently, nothing says summer like dead bodies swarming with maggots. Débuting next week is another show about a law-enforcing woman riding into town-Los Angeles again-and dealing with her colleagues’ resentment while solving unbelievably sickening violent crimes, whose graphic details we are not spared. “The Closer,” on TNT, stars Kyra Sedgwick as Brenda Johnson, a hard-charging Southerner with a twang and a ’tude. Less than three minutes into the first episode, we see a bloated body on the floor of a very nice house, its blood ruining the white carpet. The medical examiner tells the investigators that he has already cleaned up the flies, maggots, and ants, but unfortunately he can’t lift the victim’s head to show what actually killed her, because “she’s been dead for two weeks now and stuff would fall out.” It takes only a few more minutes for someone-one of Johnson’s new colleagues-to call her, with more than enough justification, a bitch, to which our heroine replies, “Excuse me, lieutenant, but if I liked being called a bitch to my face I’d still be married.” This response has no bearing on what the lieutenant is saying, but you just can’t stop this Dixie Cannonball of Southern sass. Perhaps Johnson’s abrasiveness is due to her being new in town and disoriented. “Everything’s spread out all over the place,” she says on the phone to her mama back home. In later episodes, “The Closer” may unearth some humanity in Johnson, beyond showing her alone on her hotel bed at the end of a long day, eating a Ring Ding. Let her be a bitch-but let us discover how she became one.