When a murder victim is tossed onto a baseball diamond during a friendly Boston Police Dept. game, BFF's detective Jane Rizzoli and coroner Maura Isles go running. Not odd for a body to fall in front of them -- they are in a crime drama. But an unexpectedly witty twist comes when Maura continues chatting with the handsome man who has just asked her to dinner. The girlfriends' exchange as they hover over the victim should resonate with any workaholic woman.
Jane: Oh my God, you're flirting over a dead body!
Maura: When else am I going to do it?
Unlikely but true: the new TNT series Rizzoli and Isles is Sex and the City with corpses, and I mean that in a good way. Jane (Angie Harmon) is the tough brunette who bloodies her nose playing basketball with her brother in the opening scene of tonight's pilot. Maura (Sasha Alexander) is a blonde fashionista and walking Wikipedia but with more reliable information. And their sex-and-career conversations give the show a fresh, sophisticated humor that makes it the best heir yet to SATC (the series everyone loved, not the recent movie everyone hated). Their friendship helps redefine what a female-driven crime drama can be.
A serial killer who has a history with Jane seems to be murdering again in tonight's episode, in bloody, brutal scenes; we're well past any bow to squeamishness. The plots won't get points for originality. But as Jane and Maura try to figure out who and what killed the victims, the show reverses the Law and Order model: the characters' lives are more important than the crimes. Jane's wonderfully cast family includes Lorraine Bracco as her overprotective mother, and Chazz Palminteri as her father (who turns up next week, along with the baseball scene). Harmon, whose acting often seems stiff, is more at ease here than I've ever seen her, and Alexander's dry delivery as Maura is perfect.
The series is based on Tess Gerritsen's series of Rizzoli and Isles novels, but you don't have to be a mystery-novel fan to like the television version. I'm not, but I zipped through her latest, the just-published Ice Cold, which tells me that Gerritsen's readers will be way ahead of the story when both women find themselves attracted to FBI agent Gabe Dean. (He's played by Billy Burke, Bella's father in the Twilight movies, who looks much better without that goofy moustache).
Maura wonders if they should draw straws for him and Jane suggests just lifting their shirts and flashing him so he can decide. These are exactly the kind of irreverent jokes that Carrie or Samantha might make, and they reveal the distance between this series and its most obvious model, Cagney and Lacey. In that 80's show, the two female detectives were oddities who earnestly fought the sexist establishment along with crime. Jane still has problems as a woman on the force; thankfully the new series isn't blind to lingering sexism. But it's the dry wit, secret-sharing and support between the friends that makes Rizzoli and Isles a guilty pleasure, one of the summer's most entertaining surprises.