September 25, 2005

TV: Killer Instinct

There are still about half-a-dozen new shows left to arrive this fall, but it's hard to imagine that we'll see anything worse than Killer Instinct. It's poorly written, poorly acted, and features lots of creepy lingering closeups of women being tormented.

The setting is San Francisco, and our killer of the week is a serial rapist/murderer who incapacitates his victims by releasing spiders into their apartments; the spiders' bite causes paralysis in a few minutes and death in several hours.

The show stars Johnny Messner, easily the stiffest, most wooden actor of the new season, as Jack Hale, who has just returned to the Deviant Crimes Unit of the San Francisco Police Department, several months after his partner (in both the professional and personal sense) was killed in the line of duty. (Criminal Minds shares the same plot point. Hmmm...) The usually reliable Chi McBride is Hale's commander, and like TV police commanders everywhere, gets to yell at Hale a lot for going outside the lines and breaking the rules and such.

Awful awful awful mess of a show.

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