TV: Kojak

Spoilers ahead for the premiere.

When Monk first premiered on the USA network, it was instantly a buzzworthy critical and ratings success. Now, USA tries to duplicate the magic of that debut with an updated version of Kojak, with Ving Rhames in the title role. I watched the two-hour pilot movie, and it's very clear: they failed. Unless they were intentionally trying to duplicate the Monk of this past year, rather than its first year: bad writing, lame mysteries, almost entirely unwatchable but for the compelling lead actor. In which case: congratulations!

Here is how awful the writing on the new Kojak is. The pilot opens with a punk being interrogated by two nobody cops, but they can't get anything out of him. Then in strides Kojak. He orders the other cops out of the room. He makes a big show out of removing all the bullets but one from his revolver. He slams the punk's head into the table. He puts the gun to the punk's head, and pulls the trigger -- click! The punk freaks out, but still won't break -- "They'll kill me!" Kojak pulls the trigger again -- click! It's just too much; the punk cracks and gives up everything he knows. Kojak retrieves the bullets he removed from his gun -- only to reveal the one bullet that was supposed to be in his gun was actually concealed in his hand! How very sneaky!!

Count the cliches. I mean, this is such a stupid, ridiculous, hackneyed cop show device, the movie Starsky & Hutch has a scene spoofing it, in which the suspect is aware of the trick because he's seen it on so damn many cop shows. That should've been the last time we ever had to see that scenario. The fact that Kojak uses it demonstrates either massive laziness and ignorance on the part of the writers (very likely), or great faith in Rhames to sell the scene (also likely). Problem is, Rhames can't sell it. No one can. It's like trying to play seriously a scene in which someone says, "The butler did it!" It's been cliched to death.

And that's the first five minutes. It doesn't get better.

The show tries to update Kojak in all the wrong ways; they want a Vic Mackey more than a Theo Kojak. The murders Kojak is investigating are grisly and cruel beyond reason: the killer targets prostitutes with children, and kills the women by stuffing their mouths full of razor blades, taping their mouths shut, and letting them suffocate and drown on their own blood. Nice. I know cable networks have more leeway than the broadcast networks, but I think the first responsibility with their original programming should be to up the ante in quality, rather than the gross-out factor. I'm not saying they shouldn't feel free to be more violent or sexier than their lower-channel counterparts -- more sexy violence, that's my motto! I'm just saying, maybe you should work on some of the rest of your show before you work on the killer's M.O. It seems to me more thought and creativity was put into the method of killing than any other aspect of the show, which is a little creepy.

And to match the more violent murders, they make Kojak more violent as well. First there's that interrogation scene right at the top, which shows Kojak doesn't always play by the rules! Then there's a confrontation at the end with a cop gone bad; Kojak can't expose him as bad, or he'll invalidate all the cop's arrests, so he gives the cop's information to the father of the woman the cop killed, and lets the father hunt down and kill the cop. Aside from the fact that the original Kojak would never do something like that (which really should have no bearing here; it's not like I'm a slavish fan to the original. I'm just sayin'), I didn't believe that this Kojak would do something like that, either. I didn't buy Rhames as someone so weak, he wouldn't be able to arrest a murderous cop, nor that he would allow someone else to take the responsibility out of his hands, nor that he would turn a blind eye to a revenge killing. Weak and amoral, that's our new Kojak. Hooray?

The writing fails in a number of other key moments as well. In the first hour, Kojak has a meeting with sexy D.A. Roselyn Sanchez at a restaurant; she kisses him without hesitation, then finds that he's cancelling their dinner date. The implication is that these two have been dating for a while. In the second hour, she comes over to his apartment (where he's watching the children of one of the murdered prostitutes -- yes, he cares, dammit!), and they kiss, then they go on to make a big deal about whether that counts as their first kiss. Their first kiss? What the? So that earlier kiss at the restaurant was platonic? Do D.A.s always kiss cops on the mouth when they meet outside the office? Does -- oh, I've stopped caring. It's just badly written.

Then there's the killer -- or killers, actually. The main killer is caught about ten minutes into the second hour. At first I thought the guy was going to escape, which would take up the remainder of the running time. But nope, he was locked up good and tight. So then I thought, okay, there's another bad guy. And I instantly knew it was that one over-eager, shifty-looking cop. The writing was so clumsy and unsubtle, and his acting telegraphed it so blatantly, you just knew he was bad right off the bat. And then, when we know why he's bad, we have to suffer through forty minutes of him all but screaming, It's me! I did it! Guilty! When the police return to the scene of the one murder the first killer didn't commit, a neighbor of the murdered woman tells one cop that she heard loud music coming from the woman's apartment at the time of her death -- Nelly, in fact. Cue bad cop walking by just then; when he hears the name Nelly, he sings a lyric from one of his songs. Wow. That's just awful.

I'd like to apologize to the directing right now; I've spent all this time talking about how terrible the writing was, without once mentioning how bad you were, too. I'm sorry.

All you need to know about how wretched the direction is in this pilot episode is that the overriding visual style is unnecessary slow motion. In almost every single scene, the camera will zip in for a close-up, and the film will slow to a crawl. Not just for a couple seconds -- for long stretches of time. Done once or twice, that might have been an unusual, but effective, choice. Done EVERY FRICKIN' SCENE, it's unbearable.

It's a shame. I kind of wanted to like this show. Ving Rhames is awesome, of course, and Chazz Palminteri (as Kojak's ex-partner and current boss) is also generally very good, though he didn't have much to do here. But at least now I can cross one show permanently off my TiVo schedule.