In episode six of season one of BOOMTOWN, Detective Bobby Smith engages in conversation with his long-dead and long-lost friend in that 2002-3 milestone series that introduced me to incredibly long oners, powerful dialogue, and brilliant actors who portrayed singular events from multiple points of view. Whether Detective Smith's cameo in the RAINES pilot indicates that Graham Yost is planning to blow me away again is moot, but the quality of his work presented in BAND OF BROTHERS and FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON leaves me very little room for doubt. I'm not much for who-done-it mysteries, and detective procedurals are my cure for insomnia, but I've already bought myself a RAINES season pass at iTunes, because there's just so much more juicy, layered information in the pilot than a single visit allowed me to explore. Mykelti Williamson was uncredited in the pilot, so I've got to wonder whether other spectres will rise from the flawed scraps and fragments of humanity that still make BOOMTOWN spectacularly insightful.
Of all the great cities of the world, spawned by her great rivers, perhaps only L.A. hugs the banks of an open sewer. He's back, and I'm more than ready for the instants of insane camera angle, the unexpected beauty wrung from a place where there's no There, and the onionlike complexity of real personalities opening in the mind of a writer/detective who tells vivid tales of emotional explosions like nobody else. At the center of every episode outline, under the wonderful throwaway lines and ThinMan banter, are the severely mutilated hearts and damaged lives of real people, especially the protagonist.
Michael Raines paints dead victims three-dimensionally, from the bare canvas outward, sifting through layers of hearsay contradiction to reveal a final likeness. Simultaneously, he identifies the killer by initially suspecting everybody, then whittling away impossible suspects; all of whom are merely "ordinary people". It's a process easily confused with making art. I can't spot the difference, although if this were a democracy, I'd vote for more Matt Craven.
The south forty is a ranch, "the back forty at Crawford" is too many golf courses.
Of all the great cities of the world, spawned by her great rivers, perhaps only L.A. hugs the banks of an open sewer. He's back, and I'm more than ready for the instants of insane camera angle, the unexpected beauty wrung from a place where there's no There, and the onionlike complexity of real personalities opening in the mind of a writer/detective who tells vivid tales of emotional explosions like nobody else. At the center of every episode outline, under the wonderful throwaway lines and ThinMan banter, are the severely mutilated hearts and damaged lives of real people, especially the protagonist.
Michael Raines paints dead victims three-dimensionally, from the bare canvas outward, sifting through layers of hearsay contradiction to reveal a final likeness. Simultaneously, he identifies the killer by initially suspecting everybody, then whittling away impossible suspects; all of whom are merely "ordinary people". It's a process easily confused with making art. I can't spot the difference, although if this were a democracy, I'd vote for more Matt Craven.
The south forty is a ranch, "the back forty at Crawford" is too many golf courses.