I found out what Christian Slater has been up to lately by trying to watch the pilot to the new crime drama, The Forgotten. 18 mins in and I had to stop. This show runs along a similar vein to Cold Case, Bones and the whole CSI "scientists who think they're real cops" kinda deal, only one step more ridiculous. In The Forgotten, the unlikely team of sleuths have about as much credibility as the team in Scooby Doo. Here's the premise: they are meant to be volunteers who dedicate their spare time to identifying unknown murder victims after the police give up on the case. Read that sentence a few times and you should come up with a few questions, the far from least important being "What the fucking hell?"
When the cops decide "Aw, fuck it, we'll never ID this corpse" they turn the case over to a bunch of unqualified, amateur citizens who have zero resources, no formal investigative training, not a forensic degree between them, and who only work out of hours due to their normal day jobs. If it was a show about volunteers helping to track down missing persons I could buy it, but we're talking about unidentified murder victims, murder being the one kinda case the cops are never meant to give up on. That's kinda what 'no statute of limitations on murder' means.
And how do these private citizens go about identifying homicide victims that the cops can't? Website postings? Public awareness campaigns? Billboards? Fuck that shit. One's a sculptor who, using only crime scene photos of a decomposed, partially devoured corpse, faithfully reconstructs a bust of the victim overnight. Because, of course, cops don't know how to do that sort of thing, having never attended art college. Meanwhile, the rest of the team chase leads, question suspects and chronicle the circumstantial evidence because cops never ever do that shit themselves.
You know what the cops are like: they get to the crime scene, find a body and ask "So, does anyone know who this is and who killed her? No? Damn, we've hit a brick wall. Better hand this over to Christian Slater and some other well meaning citizens. Maybe they can solve it, though if they do we'll look a bit silly cos we're meant to be the experts when it comes to the whole 'solving crime' thing. Oh, and if they do find the killer the courts might go tell us to fuck ourselves for letting amateurs abuse all that evidence we just arbitrarily handed over for no good reason. Oh well."
It's almost as though US crime drama is trying to ret-con the good old days when the Hardy Boys and Jessica Fletcher were the only ones supposedly qualified to solve murders. They're already doing it with that show Castle (a true waste of Nathan Fillion, though Stana Katic is super hot) but at least it's still cop based. It was old and boring then, and now it's old, boring and quantifiably insane. The beginning of the 21st century saw crime shows go high-tech, but producers weren't satisfied with just the nifty tech bit, so scientists were given guns and ambiguous law enforcement powers too. Now you don't even have to be on the police payroll, not even as a janitor, to solve crime. But there's actually several good reasons why psychics, stage magicians, novelists, sculptors and Christian Slater aren't actually allowed to investigate fatal crimes in real life, one of which is their habit of ignoring the fundamental 5 step process employed by just about all law enforcement agencies in the Western world:
1. Investigate the scene: the first thing a detective or investigator does when they arrive at a crime scene is put their hands in their pockets. This is to limit the chance of them actually touching anything while they survey the place and stop other people who aren't specially trained forensic techs from fucking touching shit like bullet casings, the body, cigarette butts and the like.
2. Investigate the evidence: once all the scene evidence has been secured, the photos taken, the reports from the FOS (first on scene) cop compiled and so on the detectives then review that shit to keep in mind for step 5.
3. Interview the public: ie any potential witnesses, being careful to record their statements in detail.
4. Review all documentation: this includes all that stuff recorded from steps 1 - 3 (and subsequent 'lab reports'), as well as any other relevant records that may pertain to the actions and whereabouts of any viable suspects.
5. Interview the suspect: when, and only when, has all relevant and expected evidence been collated and consulted will the police actually formally interview their suspect(s). The possible perpretrator may have been apprehended at the scene or soon after, but they wont be formally questioned until all this other data has come in, because cops need facts to form those questions. Also, suspects hardly ever confess on the spot or even in interview rooms, especially in cases as complicated as murder.
The other bit with these shows - and crime fiction in general - is the emphasis on the 'true motive' of criminals. Police don't really give a shit about focusing on motives. In order to build a case they need to know 'where', 'when', 'who' and 'how'. The 'why' bit is almost irrelevant, either because it's really fucking obvious (eg: biker retaliation killing) or unfathomable (Spenser Spreekill hated the last Star Trek film so much that the audience had to die). Motive never mitigates pre-meditated murder so long as the suspect is culpable (they know murder is wrong outside of video games) and capable (their hands work well enough to operate a gun/knife/chainsaw).
