"Find Your Happy Place"
Life begins its second season on NBC out of its new timeslot, which is meant to be Fridays at 10p ET/PT, up against CBS's popular
Numb3rs; as it is, its premiere is up against the even more popular CBS cop show
CSI: Miami. And on Friday and next Monday and Friday, three more new episodes will be offered, theoretically to give the show more exposure than it might otherwise get, though it feels like the network throwing it up against the wall to see what sticks, or even trying to burn off the episodes as quickly into the season as possible.
Life, with a title that doesn't exactly call out to viewers, was the second-best of the new series to debut last season; the best,
Journeyman, was done in by poor ratings in that same Monday night slot (AMC's
Mad Men or
Breaking Bad might be the third best, though USA's
Burn Notice and NBC's
Chuck, both not altogether lighthearted spy dramas, were more fun).
Life solved its overarching mystery by the end of last season, or so it seemed: Who set up police detective Charlie Crews (Damian Lewis) to take the fall for the murder of his friends, a crime for which he served twelve years in prison before he was exonerated, and in turn sued the City of Los Angeles for his wrongful prosecution, and won a multimillion dollar settlement and his old job back? Apparently, the architect of the crime was the retired cop father of Det. Dani Reese (Sarah Shahi), Crews's partnerand the focus of Charlie's personal investigation seems to be turning toward proving this, and figuring out why it happened, while also seeking to protect the only survivor of the massacre, Rachel Seybolt (Jessy Schram), a young child at the time of the murders and now almost an adult, who had been raised by the actual murderer, Kyle Hollis (Titus Welliver) now in jail but for years working as an evangelist minister and perhaps even genuinely repentant, if no less hostile to Crews and his attempts to get to the bottom of the conspiracy against him.
Meanwhile, Reese, who early on had resented being partnered with Crews, largely because he'd cultivated an eccentric and vaguely Zen outlook to help him cope with his imprisonment, came to wonder if their pairing had been orchestrated by someone, perhaps someone hoping to use her treated substance abuse problem (picked up while working undercover) against them. Even with the evidence, court-worthy or not, of her father's involvement, she's not happy having to carry that taint along with her other burdens. Their old captain (Robin Weigert) had warned both her and eventually both of them that powerful individuals in the police force and city government had it in for them (and it's notable that with Weigert and Welliver, fellow
Deadwood veteran Brent Sexton has a major supporting role, as uniformed Officer Robert Stark). With the new season, they get a new captain, Kevin Tidwell (Donal Logue), who blatantly would like to get to know Reese better, a desire she doesn't reciprocate.
Most of the larger concerns of the series are put aside, or dealt with in side conversations, as the detectives deal with a serial murder case they've caught, involving initially three victims somehow forced into large trunks, which are left out in the Los Angeles summer sun to bake and suffocate their seemingly unrelated victims, a lawyer, a go-go dancer and aspiring actress, and the owner of a packaging and stationery store. The investigation of these crimes is relatively straightforward, as the primary and ultimately confessing suspect is one of the first people we see interviewed, an assistant and graphic designer at the packaging store who rather too neatly fits the repressed serial killer stereotype, even down to living essentially with his mother, the discovery of which prompts Dani to wonder why such men are always good candidates for this kind of crime. Noel Fisher gives a good performance in the role, managing to make a familiar kind of monster still a bit disturbing.
And Crews, and his housemate and financial manager (and old cellmate) Ted Earley (Adam Arkin), manage to find where the wounded Rachel is hiding, and take her back to their mansion; as far as she remembers clearly, Hollis has always been her father, and Crews is more a threat to her than a friend.
A decent episode, with the excellent lead performances and nice, often very funny or startling (or both) bits of incidental business one expects from this series; I suspect new viewers are a bit lost, given how much ground was covered in the first, strike-shortened season (the previous episodes are available for streaming on NBC.com and Hulu.com and on DVD). I'm thinking I might like to look at least the last two episodes of the first season again, to refresh my memory of some of the detailsnot that rewatching the episodes is a chore. Particularly when the show is so well shot, a credit at very least to Director of Photography Sid Sidellthe only other show I can think of to match it in that is some other cop show on Mondays at tenand that one can't match it in any other way.
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Life, please see our
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