Ice Road Truckers

History Channel: Sundays 9 PM Eastern

I'm always on the lookout for another guilty pleasure. I've loved COPS since 1989, and I'll even admit to memorizing Dirty Harry's “Do ya feel lucky?” speech. Well, nearly.

But I don't want too much guilt. It rots the soul. So I won't watch Povich or Springer. I couldn't care less if DNA shows that one guy or the other is some poor kid's pitiful excuse for a father.

But Ice Road Truckers is a candidate for my new guilty pleasure. No plot, but “reality” that I might relate to. I watched an episode called “Accident Alley,” part of the third season of the series.

The premise is simple: follow northbound and southbound eighteen wheelers and listen to the men and woman who negotiate an “ice road:” this season, five hundred miles of the dangerous Dalton highway that stretch north from Fairbanks Alaska to Deadhorse on Prudhoe Bay. The show follows Jack, George, Lisa, Tim, Hugh and Alex as they push their rigs over mountains and, sometimes, over the frozen Arctic Sea! (Did they really place a camera under transparent ice to shoot Lisa Kelly’s truck passing above or was it CG? I can’t tell.)

A couple of years ago I negotiated the Adirondack mountains, driving a big U-Haul through snow and ice for endless hours... and I had to make two round trips! So, I reasoned, I have an affinity for brave souls who push s teel behemoths over tundra just to be sure that gasoline gets to my wheezing guzzler. An Alaskan white-out reminded me of that same Adirondack route with my wife; her head sticking out of the window like a frozen Dalmatian, trying to see the edge of the road. We were terrified.

But these truckers have a cool professionalism that is worth watching, at least for a time. They're pragmatic. Trucker Jack Jessee says “Hitting a moose is like hitting a brick wall… its going to tear your truck all to pieces.” They’re fatalistic: “There are two kinds of drivers on the road: the ones that have been in the ditch, and the ones that are going to go in the ditch.”

The show uses lots of stationary cameras placed under or on the side of trucks, or they put one on the road so that a big rig can blast over it, or have a cameraman shooting trucks as they approach or pass by, and even aerial footage of the trucks as they plow through the snow. And that raises a question: Can we really believe that these truckers are in such a terrible hurry when they obviously have to take time out from their runs to set up the shots? And if some of the shots are staged, then how much of this “reality” drama isn’t really real?

Then there is the repetition. The show uses the same film clips over and over again. We see a moose nearly getting creamed as it crosses the road three times, and Lisa looses her breaks three times as well. The computer recreation of a truck turning over and spilling its load is shown, you guessed it, three times.

Do the producers figure we’ve forgotten what happened already? Or is there just not enough interesting stuff happening to hold my attention for an hour? I actually watched somebody fix a flat tire, and I’ll never get that time back. And how often will I have to hear people praising the product-placement tools?

Yes, ice road truckers have courage, and there is a natural drama to their dangerous work. Like airline pilots, their lives reflect “hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” But there is just too much boredom to keep me interested.

The Guru

HawthoRNE

Fair or unfair, I judge medical shows by how they depict a Code Blue. The real thing is the rawest of dramas: fifteen or more professionals descending on a room within sixty seconds of the alarm and performing meticulously organized chaos to save a helpless human body. When done right, there is even someone who guards elevator doors to be sure that family is intercepted before blundering onto the scene. I'd rather watch My Mother the Car than see a depiction that comes off as too real. I've been involved in codes more than once, and I'm a wimp.

So when not one but two patients' hearts stop during the pilot of HawthoRNe (emphasis on the RN) I was relieved to see a sanitized version of reality.

Chief Nurse Christina Hawthorne [Jada Pinkett Smith: she of the bad girl leather outfit in Matrix 2 & 3] is the gutsy head nurse in Richmond Trinity Hospital. She bends rules to the breaking point while facing widowhood and bringing up a gutsy teenage daughter Camile [Hannah Hodson] who, strangely, also bends rules to the breaking point.

A pilot for a series has but one opportunity to get the attention of the Powers in TVland, so the producers and writers of HawthoRNe (and Pinkett Smith is an ExProd) threw in everything but the E.R. sink to get the job done.

In this episode we are presented with a suicidal patient, a street lady with something special in her shopping cart, and a near fatal mistake that leads to the aforementioned second Code Blue. Three medical sub-plots are a bit much. After all, CSI only deals with two crime scenes per episode. Don't forget the time we need to explore the Goth daughter's turmoil and nurse Christine's soliloquies to a funeral urn. That makes five themes. I think there were six, but I left to get a glass of water.

This is an ensemble cast, of course. Surgeon Dr. Tom Wakefield [Michael Vartan, Alias] offers support and conflict, and David Julian Hirsh does a nice rif about nurse Ray, a man in a traditionally women's profession. Jillian Armenante [Judging Amy] is a veteran actress with depth, but she has a small role and doesn't appear in the web page cast list. Will she be there next week? I hope so. The problem with pilots is that we don't know who will last. Captain Pike didn't do Star Trek, and Fr. Mulcahy wasn't in the pilot for TV's M*A*S*H.

But wait! I forgot about nurse Candy, [Christina Moore: MADtv] who looks pretty in pink and is the generous type, giving a nearly R-rated reward to a returning war hero. I'm all for fulfilling male fantasies, but, hey, this is only an hour show not counting commercials. Subtract one plot point and there would have been more time for gratuitous sex.

HawthoRNe doesn't have the edginess of, say, Saving Grace. But it has good moments. If the writers settle down and cast members grow into their parts, it could be what the doctor ordered.

TNT Wednesdays at 9:00 Eastern, 8:00 Central

The Guru

THE CLOSER

In baseball, a closer is a pitcher who can take over when the starter begins to lose his oomph; usually, after ninety pitches or so. As TNT's The Closer premiers its fifth season, (Mondays 9:00 PM Eastern) at the question is, does Kyra Sedgewick's character still have, ahem, legs?

By now we know the premise: a talented and quirkily beautiful southern woman arrives in L.A. to lead a team of homicide20detectives. Her private life is a confusion of lost keys and furtive chocolate, but professionally Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson is tops. If a closer in baseball saves the game with strikeouts, this police Closer always, always gets a confession by the end of a show, thank you, thank you very much.

It's a rework of classic drawing room endings. Hercule or Charlie or Nero gathers suspects together and, after much questioning, unmasks the killer. The real reason for all those people is to demonstrate the brilliance of the Great Detective.

Brenda uses an interview room, not a living room, but she has her own Greek chorus consisting of pretty much the entire cast. They gather b ehind the two way mirror, whispering sweet somethings into her earpiece and praising the Great Detective's cunning to any doubters present.

For the last couple of seasons, Brenda has discovered fashion, replacing southern flounce with wonderful looking clothing. While my southern wife tells me that Sedgewick's accent is fine, (the actress grew up in New York City,) Atlanta women do not dress country.

But the character is usually fun, and we actually like to see her blundering through her love life with F.B.I. Special Agent Fritz Howard, played with Job-like patience by Jon Tenni. [Recurring roles in CSI and Will & Grace.] That is testimony to consistently good writing. I mean, I20never gave a rat's south end about Cagney and Lacey's private lives: let’s get back to the action. But at home Brenda Leigh always seems about to hack up a furball, and that's worth waiting for.

In last year's finale the couple managed to carve out enough time between cases to get married. It was funny and touching. But the season opener, “Products of Discovery,” written by Michael Alaimo, disappoints.

A family of four is found murdered execution style. The husband/suspect actually mentions that he doesn't allow sweets in the house a couple of T.V. minutes after a chocolate bar is pointed out at the crime scene. Wow, what a break, to have a key clue appear just then! Are there any red herrings, or did I blink? We know by long television tradition that the first suspect is usually innocent, so that doesn't count. Its part of the structure, just like we know that when a cameraman places a door in the shooting frame, somebody will walk through it.

The heavy-handed clues lead to the real killer after a jurisdictional triangle between Brenda's Major Crimes Division and the F.B.I. that puts poor Fritzi yet again in the hypotenuse. But my couch mate and I were way ahead of Brenda at every turn, even when she does her stuff in a prison visitation booth instead of back at headquarters.

I don't mind formulaic cop shows. Done well, they're like jazzman Ramsey Lewis finding yet another variant of Billy Boy: pleasingly different within the structure. But we knew who done it two commercials before Brenda caught on, and that just isn't much fun.

Worse, Brenda's first episode as a married woman could have been delightfully chaotic, but all the show could offer was a subplot about Kitty. Brenda still hasn't found time to name the cat, still refers to her as a him, and doesn't recognize that the obviously healthy and content feline is, in reality, sick. Will Kitty survive her trip to the vet, or will we discover that she has nine lives?

I love the series, but just hope that this new season of The Closer isn't running out of pitches.

The Guru - Michael S. Jones