TV: Criminal Minds, Numb3rs, Without a Trace

These crime television shows are repeats of the same mindless and predictable crap that Hollywood puts out on a regular basis.

Here's where these shows went wrong. They each had an interesting premise, but they didn't run with it.

Criminal Minds: criminal profiling

Numbers: use of math in solving crimes

Without a Trace: following missing persons rather than murder

Instead it was the same ol', same ol'. The crime is solved at the end of the hour, everything is right with the world again.

The real problem with these shows lay in the 1-dimensional characters. Ah-hem...all you script-writers, producers, directors out there -- 1-dimensional characters are BORING and that makes the show boring.

These shows don't give us anyone to care about. Yes, we don't like the idea of a victim getting shmiced and we want the bad buy getting double shmiced, but they don't give us anyone to hate, or to be afraid of. Rather than giving us a character, they create these horrible, unimaginable crime scenarios, possibly even based on real-life events. However, we mystery lovers have already seen it all, read it all, and been to enough gory movies, it is impossible to come up with any more hideous crimes. You don't need creepy crimes, you need creepy criminals.

I think all 3 of these shows need to be reworked. Part of the problem was these shows had too many characters most of them working on the case. Wait a minute. In real life are there that many people working on one single case? Worse, every single one of these characters are completely focused on their job, nothing else. Hmm, don't these people have lives outside of work? Don't most of them actually hate their jobs? Aren't they getting cynical working with really sicko cases.

Here's a term we learned in high school that people who are going to put out any type of fiction should keep in mind: character development. From scene one, you need to start developing your three main characters, and if the actors aren't up to it, then find some who have enough brains to flesh out a complete person instead of merely speaking someone else's lines.

One of the things that makes 24 so good is to see how the bureaucrats mess slow everything down and mess everything up.

Oh, read the books, Snakes in Suits and the Sociopath Next Door. Apparently not all psychopaths are serial killers. A lot of them find regular jobs and simply lie, cheat and make life miserable for all the other employees. Yet on these TV shows everyone is working smoothly to solve the crime. Come on, bring complexity to these shows, make us care about the victim they're trying to save, love and hate the ones trying to solve the crime and fear the criminal. If the case isn't solved in an hour...well there's another term we learned in highschool and it is called: cliffhanger.