An innocent bystander that could get clipped by our current barrage of complex TV crime/adventure thrillers is good old-fashioned procedurals like CBS’s new
Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, which debuts Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET.
Beyond Borders carries on the crime-of-the-week procedural tradition in every sense. It’s a spinoff from a successful CBS mothership and it stars two characters beloved in the game: Gary Sinise as Jack Garrett and Alana De La Garza as Clara Seger (both at top).
At the risk of a mild spoiler, they’re reunited in the first episode and together will be soldiering off to rescue Americans who have fallen into trouble in foreign countries.
Their services are required, Beyond Borders implies, because police departments in foreign countries may not always feel the urgency or implement the procedures and protections we feel American citizens deserve.
Yes, there’s an unspoken undertone that all foreign police departments may not be as competent as Garrett’s nimble and mobile International Response Team, which also includes computer whiz Monty Montgomery (Tyler James Williams), former special forces star Matthew Simmons (Daniel Henney) and medical examiner Mae Jarvis (Annie Funke).
It would also be no surprise to find some of those foreign departments hampered by internal corruption, though the first episode plays it relatively straight and suggests the biggest hurdles lie in cultural customs and language.
Happily, Seger speaks every known language this side of ancient Aztec.
In Wednesday’s episode, two American college students who have been volunteering on a farm in Thailand suddenly drop off the radar for two days, leading their families and the team to move in quickly before the case has a bad outcome.
Using the standard tools of current TV police procedurals, which include computer research, forensics and smart profiling, the team races against a typhoon to track down the missing girls in a tropical jungle.
If the first episode is any indication, Beyond Borders will, as a bonus, offer an interesting visual tour of the foreign lands in which Americans can run into trouble.
Wednesday’s hour includes colorful glimpses of both Bangkok and more rural countryside.
The problem for Beyond Borders, and this could extend to other procedurals though not all, is that with the number of long-form police/crime/mystery/suspense/action dramas popping up on television these days, crime-of-the-week series can seem comparatively formulaic.
Okay, that’s not automatically a problem, because safe formulas are one reason why CBS in particular has done so well with procedurals. Viewers get to know the characters, get to know what they can expect and in almost every instance will have everything wrapped up inside an hour.
But compared to series from Breaking Bad and The Americans to American Crime, Game of Thrones or Homeland, a Beyond Borders can start to feel a little more like paint-by-the-numbers.
The characters, much as we like them, rarely surprise us, and because the case has to be wrapped up in a few relatively brief segments, the elements must fall into place neatly and rapidly.
As skilled as CBS writers are at weaving these elements together, the premiere of Beyond Borders at times has the vague feel of Friday the 13th, where potential victims and would-be perps engage in an almost ritualistic dance while the good guys race against the clock to intervene.
Procedurals, we should hasten to add, are hardly about to disappear. They’re still a popular and legitimate TV genre. But with an increasing number of more complex and nuanced shows on the menu, they may at times feel a little less filling.