Fruit, Murder

So I did bake banana muffins after all.

Also, I bought a whole lot of decorative lemons (you know, to put in a big ceramic bowl in the china hutch, something that strikes me as charming) and now they're old and I need to make a lot of:

- lemon cake
- lemon spaghetti
- lemonade

I'd get right on that, but I've been busy watching things, all manner of things, but notably the first episode of The Women's Murder Club, which has either the best name or the worst name on television.

I felt mixedly about it. I don't know what I think about their silly affairs (I'm looking at you, blonde DA lady) though I do like the idea of having to work with your ex-husband (very His Girl Friday). I like the lady reporter who's a strange blend of autodidact and Asperger's, and even though they've written Angie Harmon some horrid lines, she still seems like a pretty cool cop. The medical examiner seems like the voice of reason, but she lost major points for me with the "Jobs don't hug you back" line.

Incorporating themes of work v. love into the show was somewhat successful; they applied to both the protags and the villains/victims, creating a sense of cohesion. This is the kind of device that signals thematic depth and tautness in television writing, a la House (Seasons 1 and 2, of course) but can feel a little hammered home at times. It would be nice to leave the love v. work dichotomy out of a show about professional women but it's rather inescapable if you're going to delve deeply into the characters at all.

However, I'd like to see the girl-talk angle swiftly dispatched altogether. It seems intended to be humanizing/bantery/juicy but just ends up making the characters come off as a little immature (making girly chitchat at an autopsy seems lame, though I liked the way they determined the victim was seeing someone new by a glance at her Brazilian wax job!). It's a time-honored trope of the genre that detectives have hideous love lives, so it follows that these women might; it just doesn't seem to be handled very well at the moment.

Finally, what's up with the multi-character musical montages at the end of every single drama nowadays? Once I hear the wistful music and see each character reflecting on stuff, well ... it makes me wonder if it isn't the biggest cliche of our time, akin to the freeze frames of the late 70s/early 80s cop/crime shows (J.B. Fletcher!) .... enough with the montages! Other than minor quibbles with the girl talk, montage and some dialog, I don't have too many bones to pick with the writing. It's pretty tight in most places even if the mystery was a little thin.

I'll definitely give it a few more episodes and see what the future holds. There's a serial killer on the loose, so that should be entertaining enough ...