Women's Murder Club

One of the most recent shows to truly surprise me has been Women’s Murder Club. I resisted watching at first, catching only a few minutes of the pilot episode. I suppose because my impression of the show resembled Desperate Housewives who solve murders! Or perhaps, The Babysitter’s Club, all grown up meets Charlie’s Angels or some other silly association which existed only in the shallowness of my mind.

However one of my friends talked me into giving the show a second (first?) chance and I found it to be not only surprisingly good, but funny, and even charming in it’s own way.

The show, based on a series of novels, revolves around police detective Lindsay Boxer, who is by turns tough, grouchy, antagonistic, personally awkward at times and yet exceedingly good at her job. Her fellow partners in (solving) crime consist of the medical examiner Dr. Claire Washburn, ADA Jill Bernhardt and the newest member of the extremely unofficial club, a cub reporter named Cindy Thomas whose exists as the one most diametrically opposed to Boxer. She’s young, idealistic, a little too chatty, but like the rest of the women, she is also very good at her job. As a reporter, she has the most freedom from rules and procedures, but she also has the least amount of direction on any given investigation. Her job seems mainly to find whatever information can be informally gathered and pass it along to the more official members of the circle of friends. The information they share is based on their ability to trust and depend on one another, which is where the notion of a club, whose membership has to be earned, has come from.

And Cindy, as the newest member and the one most aware of the informal rules and procedures the others have grown accustomed to, is the one most often referring to it in terms of being a club. Their interaction is still new enough to her to be able to see it from the outside as well as from within.

What WMC does right is to continue the idea which exists at the heart of procedurals like the endless CSI and Law & Order franchises, which is to follow cases through the nuts and bolts of the investigation process. But instead of leaving the personal lives and interpersonal connections of those doing the investigating largely for the sidebars or up to the imaginations, the show attempts to weave their lives, or lack thereof, into the fabric of the work they do. And allowing the friendship which exists between them to be the thread which unites the two together.

Rest assured, that unlike many of those other shows, no one is going to spend years on a show like this and then pop off with something like the infamous “Is it because I’m a lesbian” type of plot contrive.. err.. device, or reveal a previously consummated relationship a la Grissom and Sarah who apparently learned nothing from the experiences of Mulder and Scully..

And while the blending of the personal and the professional with this group isn’t necessarily seamless (asking about pregnancy tests and dates over corpses is.. unusual, but understandable given that Claire, the ME, seems to be the designated 'mother' of the group), it does create a sense of pathos and kinship between all the women which radiates out to the other relationships in their lives. And the sisterly bickering and looking out for each other is a refreshing change from programs who find their bread and butter in the decidedly non-sisterly bickering and back-stabbing which are so often associated with groups of female friends on television.

The lives of these women are also very different. We have the married mother, the commitment-phobe, the divorced (and yet clearly not over it yet) detective and the very young woman who is still starry-eyed enough to come out of a quasi kidnapping remembering mainly that the guy responsible was “cute”. And the fact that each of them seems to have their own unique sets of flaws and challenges, instead of contradicting the strength demonstrated by their professional prowess, instead only helps to give a sense of balance and individuality to each of them beyond what can be gleaned from quips and banter revolving solely around whatever case they happened to be working on.

I have to believe the fact that these characters were already fully realized in another medium has helped with their transition to television, giving them an already established sense of dimension and personality which might be lacking in characters created out of whole cloth. And also gives their established, and burgeoning, friendships a similar sense of depth.

I find myself a little ashamed for needing to be prodded to give a show like this a chance, since my cynicism could have cost me a chance to watch one of the better shows and more interesting depiction of a group of friends that I’ve seen in a while. And it makes me think back to a show like Charlie’s Angels, which attempted an almost similar kind of duality between the personal and professional, even if it got too caught up in the cheese and eye candy quotient for its own good.

I almost wish WMC had a different title. For just as they often try to shake off the idea that it’s a ‘club’ which keeps them together, the word club in this context evokes images of book clubs, Tupperware parties and women gathering to define their social calendars. Professional women banding together to share their knowledge and expertise in solving crimes would be a cumbersome title, I suppose. In truth, they really are just doing their jobs, only with keeping an eye out for each other and trying to figure out what each can do to help achieve their goal. And more than that, ones who will perhaps go above and beyond what they might normally do in their jobs in order to help their friends with theirs.

So a club it is, even if it isn’t. And a good show it is, even though a big part of me didn’t expect it to be. Guess we're all better off with a little help from our friends.