Bad Guys, Beware
These crime busters get down and dirty
Do we really want — or need — yet another TV crime drama, especially one as grim and violent as Wanted? Perhaps not, but it's unwise these days to bet against TNT, which is on a roll this summer with a highly rated Western (Into the West) and police procedural (The Closer).
With this latest series (Sundays, 10 pm/ET), TNT plunges headfirst and with uneven results into raunchy territory, following the graphic adventures of trash-talking, fist-flailing heroes who would be almost indistinguishable from the villains if the evil prey weren't all such a rancid, horrific lot.
"The job is simple: hunt down the worst 100 criminals at large in Los Angeles," says the boss of an undercover unit comprised of an alphabet soup of mavericks from the LAPD, ATF, FBI, SWAT, Naval Intelligence and U.S. Marshals Service.
Because "nobody on the list wants to be taken alive," as pugnacious team leader Conrad "Connie" Rose (Gary Cole) explains, these search-and-capture missions have the incendiary feel of urban street combat. The crossfire is intense, and in the first episodes, children are cruelly victimized. Hence, the strike force has little patience for protocol and civil-rights niceties in their high-tech surveillance and brutal interrogation tactics. Even the conservative Christian virgin on the crew has serious anger-management issues.
Unfortunately, it's not all action. Wanted is left wanting whenever it slows down to show Connie's predictably miserable personal life. That's pretty much what you'd expect from a show with nothing but a self-conscious macho attitude in its arsenal.
