Posted on: Monday, November 17, 2003
TV REVIEW
'Without a Trace' shrewd drama
By Ken Parish Perkins
Knight Ridder News Service
It has become fashionable to dismiss "ER" as a bedridden invalid and credit "Without a Trace" for putting it there.
Sure, "ER" (9 p.m. Thursdays, NBC) was once a ratings leader so Goliath-like it seemed silly to challenge it with just about anything. And, yes, as quickly as "Without a Trace" has gained viewers in its current head-to-head skirmish, "ER" has lost them.
Whether one drama's audience has risen at the cost of the other is a debate to be taken up with Nielsen families. But how unfortunate that the success of "Without a Trace" (9 p.m. Thursdays, CBS) is being characterized as some sort of horse race. How disappointing that any time someone is talking about "Trace" it's about how the viewer gap is closing (only 6 million separates the two shows!) or how the old warhorse "ER" is showing its cracks — in other words, focusing more on "ER's" slide than on "Trace's" accomplishments.
Perhaps if "Trace" were up against, say, "Tarzan" or some other 90-pound weakling, the series would get credit for being what it is: a shrewdly designed, well-executed drama, the likes of which we haven't seen on a broadcast network in some time.
I say shrewd because, though "Trace" is far from groundbreaking television, it has an almost unconscious, irresistible pull. It borrows elements of the successful formula created by producer Jerry Bruckheimer and his talented crew of executive producers/writers, from the gumshoe procedural detective work to the cosmetic coloring to the stylized flashbacks to the cast made up of similar ensemble types. (The leader of the Bruckheimer crime unit is always serious, seasoned, white and, until "Cold Case," male).
Even its premise, about missing persons and the federal agents who doggedly pursue them, isn't original. "Missing Persons" came and went on ABC in 1993.
What "Trace" does offer is an uncanny ability to blend all of this in a sophisticated way. It never looks the least bit messy or sophomoric, it never feels as though it's regurgitating what we've already seen on "CSI" and its clones, or even "Law & Order" and its clones.
For instance, "Trace" walks the procedural-versus-personal tightrope with skill, not falling into the melodramatic trappings of series like "NYPD Blue," but at the same time acknowledging that police are not their jobs, but human beings with lives outside of them.
If "Trace's" stories explore the emotional lives of the missing people, their friends and family left behind, how could it leave out its investigators and not seem, as "Law & Order" does, outwardly gimmicky?
This is what makes "Trace" connect better emotionally than "CSI," which relies so heavily on the cool forensic toys, the visuals, that it renders its characters almost window dressing.
And "Trace" has a kind of intellectual weight. A story line involving a pedophile will lead to a touchy debate about pedophilia, a plot about a man with two wives to a discussion of polygamy, an episode about terrorism to observations about racial profiling.
The agents — played by Anthony LaPaglia, Poppy Montgomery, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Enrique Murciano and Eric Close — unwrap the layers of a missing person's life, hoping to figure out where they are by learning who they are.
Slowly, personal details are revealed, and we see the missing person's life emerge, each revelation helping to fill in the blanks. I've heard "Trace" fans admit to a sort of uncomfortable feeling, knowing that if anyone looked hard enough into their life, something hidden deep would most likely be unearthed.
All the while, the agents drop little morsels of information about their own lives — a word, a look, a reaction. (It's as though the viewers are asked to piece together their own investigation of the characters; this is as interactive as prime-time television gets.)
The most effective lure of "Trace" is its replacement of the "whodunit" formula with "Where did they go?"
Unlike murder dramas, which are murder dramas because someone is dead, the end condition of "Trace's" missing person is never clear — alive, dead, being tortured, just in need of some space?
