Super Dicks

We've gotten into the habit of watching TV on Netflix during dinner. We used to watch the same series every  night. First it was Dark Shadows, then Have Gun - Will Travel, then Dr. Who. Then I got worried about running out of shows, so I stacked up a whole set of series. Strangely, they are all 21st century shows about detectives with superpowers.

We have finished the whole series of The Dresden Files. It stars Harry Dresden as a wizard and consulting detective in modern-day Chicago. Pretty police detective Valerie Cruz sometimes uses his talents, and he has a foppish ghost named Bob for a sidekick (Terence Mann). The tone is fairly light, with Bob doing most of the comic relief, along with little modern magical touches, like Harry's drumstick for a magic wand. I had read one of the Jim Butcher novels the series is based on, and wasn't impressed. For one thing, they don't have Bob, our favorite part.

Then there is Numb3rs. It features Rob Morrow as an FBI detective and David Krumholtz as a mathematician who uses his genius to help solve crimes. The tone is much darker, the crimes bloody and violent and Krumhotz has big sad Elijah Wood eyes that show all the pain this causes him. The math and science are supposed to be real, and they do that pretty well. It's well written (so far), well acted and their dad is played by Judd Hirsch.

Psych is much lighter, basically a comedy. James Roday plays an amiable young man whose hard-ass cop father taught him to be very observant. He can solve a crime just by glancing at it, noting the telling details and filling in the blanks. When the police decide that he knows too much and must be involved in the crimes, he pretends he is psychic to explain his powers. He ropes his friend Dulé Hill into forming a psychic detective agency and goes to work.


It's pretty silly, although they do try to make the crimes and solutions plausible. Hill is the eternal reluctant sidekick, but the writers actually let him win a few. He has his own superpowers: He has a supersensitive nose, and since his dayjob is pharmaceutical salesman, he knows a lot about obscure drugs. 


Lie to Me is kind of in between - it is less intense than Numb3rs, less goofy than Psych, while still being fairly intense and pretty goofy. Headliner Tim Roth's superpower is lie-detection: He can read your emotions and tell if you are lying. He has a consulting agency that works mainly for the government, catching liars. 


Now, I love Tim Roth, although I haven't seen him in much. Really, it's mostly his role in RosenKrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He's a great presence here, insightful, tricky, and totally cynical because he knows that everyone lies about everything.


Rounding out the lineup, Burn Notice doesn't quite fit in. The hero, Jeffrey Donovan, doesn't really have a superpower. He was a spy until he is burned by his agency: cut loose, cut off from all of his contacts as well as his credit cards. He is stuck in Miami with his ex-IRA ex-girlfriend Gabrielle Anwar, his ex-buddy Bruce Campbell, and his psycho-family. So he spends his time solving crime and helping the little people while trying to find out why he was burned. And maybe his superpower is "spycraft".


The location gives it a touch of Miami Vice, and so does the easy going vibe. Our favorite part is, of course, Bruce Campbell. It's funny, there's some decent action, and every episode (so far) has a stand-alone case plus some movement on the overall arc of Donovan's burn. My sister's family turned me on to this one. 


I know that there are a bunch more of these - House is the same kind of eccentric genius, for example. Or Leverage, about a team of con artists that solve crime. But these aren't on Netflix. Anyway, I don't think we will run out of material for a while.