Crime pays, if you're a television network, and especially if you're network television, where reckoning with malefactors has a long and rich history and continues to have a dominating presence. On some fundamental level, NBC equals "Law & Order" and whatever else Dick Wolf has going, and CBS is just "NCIS" and a bunch of sitcoms.
There is, among these shows, an unavoidable embrace of the obvious, given just how many thousands — hundreds of thousands — of hours such stories have logged over the years. Many lack "seriousness," even when they're dealing with serious things, a weightlessness that helps make them watchable week after week. Problems are solved within an episode, even when longer arcs are attached; it's character and not cliffhangers that draw you back. Life is messy, they say, but it generally works out — except for the body in the library, of course.
The winter season has added a few new untrue crime stories to the broadcast catalog, pushing some of the same buttons — action, suspense, romance (which is also suspense) and leavening comedy — with various degrees of emphasis, in different aesthetic flavors. Each has its charms, its sticky premise, its attractive, TV-sized cast.
