La Femme Nikita

A clever criminal and the FBI agent who put him behind bars team up to solve white-collar crimes.

A blacklisted doctor stumbles into private medical service for the rich and famous in the Hamptons.

An inexperienced CIA trainee with top-notch linguistic skills becomes a field operative under mysterious circumstances in this action-drama series.

A crime thriller about a young mother who commits a public act of violence and the investigator who attempts to learn why.

The versatile Tony Shalhoub starred in this weekly, hour-long mystery series as Adrian Monk, an unorthodox but undeniably brilliant San Francisco police detective. Quitting the force after the death of his wife, Monk suddenly began developing profound and bizarre obsessive-compulsive tendencies, allowing his many phobias -- including a morbid fear of heights, germs, darkness, crowds, even dairy products -- to compromise his skills as a forensic investigator. Nonetheless, Monk flourished as a private detective with the help of his live-in nurse Sharona Fleming (Bitty Schram) and the grudging assistance of his envious former SFPD superior Captain Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine). A marvelous blend of high humor and deadly seriousness (in the two-hour opener, Monk had to chase a perpetrator into the sewer system, nearly causing him to go into a hissy-fit when his immaculate wardrobe picked up a stain or two), Monk debuted with much fanfare over the USA cable network on July 12, 2002.

Another of the many "tough but troubled heroine" cable-TV dramatic series of the early 21st Century, In Plain Sight starred Mary McCormick as Mary Shannon, a no-nonsense US Marshal connected with a Federal Witness Relocation service known as WITSEC. It was Mary's job to "baby-sit" criminals and innocent bystanders who'd been given new identities and homes in exchange for courtroom testimony, and to keep her charges' whereabouts a secret from potential assassins. The pressures brought to bear on Mary during her working hours were exacerbated by the fact that she could not reveal the nature of her work to her friends or family members. Worse still, our heroine was saddled with an overgrown-delinquent sister named Brandi (Nichole Hilz) and a boozy, overbearing mom named Jinx (Lesley Ann Warren). Helping to get Molly over the rough spots were her boss Stan McQueen (Paul Ben-Victor), her partner and best friend Marshall Mann (Frederick Weller), and her lover Raphael (Cristian De La Fuente). Debuting with a special 76-minute episode on June 1, 2008, the sixty-minute In Plain Sight was seen by some 5 million viewers, a near-record for the USA network.