Killer serials capture viewers' imaginations on network TV

DETECTIVES playing mind games with murderers: it's a sub-genre at which network TV has learned to excel.

Kevin Bacon and Jeananne Goossen in The Following

IN 1981 with Red Dragon, Thomas Harris cleverly combined the detective procedural and the gothic melodrama to create serial killer fiction.

Villains committing multiple murders had been with us for a while but until Harris appeared on the scene, none had been so closely modelled on what was known about real killers driven by fantasy to kill again and again. Crime fiction would never be the same.

Now it's a staple, often a humdrum formula for the untalented, dominant both in publishing and on the screen, with its distinctive repertoire of plots, characters and settings. And Harris created a new fascination in popular culture not only with serial killers, once known as signature murderers, but also with the so-called profilers who pursue them. The reclusive Harris has a lot to answer for: his wit and literary stylishness made Hannibal Lecter the most admired killer in history, but his success created a trail of imitators trafficking in willed cruelty and revengeful fantasy.

They've been all over TV ever since, the best to date being CBS's Criminal Minds - season eight of which premiered on Seven last week - with its moody team of mind-hunting profilers from the FBI's Behavioural Analysis Unit. It's been running for years and still we lap it up, fascinated by its reconstructions of the criminal sensibility and aberrant human behaviour.

The almost sensual dialectic between indulgence and disapproval is possibly behind the huge success of the genre in fiction as well as on TV. We are kept in a state of enjoyable curiosity that is nicely mixed with a kind of bewilderment. And like bestselling crime fiction this well-produced, tightly written series provides a mystery text that's easily consumable and then just as easily forgotten, one of the reasons it's so successful. The characters tantalise and tease us into wanting to resolve the contradictions while we watch; when it's over we go to the fridge and think about something else.

It's what made Harris so original at the start. He almost lasciviously indulged his readers' fascination with the killer and simultaneously allowed us to recant the enthralment. Or keep it under control by identifying with a policing protagonist or organisation.

Criminal Minds focuses on a taskforce that concentrates on depraved criminals, most of them serial, trying to calculate their next move and catch them in the act. The series is eerie in tone, suitably gothic with its scenes of terror, human frailty and failure. It's also cinematically smart, often shot elegantly like 45-minute feature films. Criminal Minds is fond, too, of softly spoken literary quotes that usually open each episode, wistfully delivered in voice-over by a character, a source of irritation to some critics but a source of pleasure to jaded TV crime addicts.

In the eighth season premiere, the BAU acquaints itself with a new team member, and last week reacquainted itself with an old unsub (or unknown subject). This week the BAU is called to two crime scenes in Los Angeles and San Diego; although the murders appear to be unrelated, the team's profile posits two unsubs working together in a deadly pact.

Alex Blake, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, has joined the team, adding her linguistic talents to the unit's skills set. Better known in recent years for playing a matronly Mormon in SBS's Big Love, she's good at that kind of deadpan, concentrated, filmic style of acting that always results in a carefully stylised naturalism, and should be an interesting addition to the cast of mind hunters.

Perhaps of more particular interest to Harris fans is Nine's Hannibal, starting in a fortnight, written by Bryan Fuller, best known for working on Heroes and Pushing Daisies. The series is essentially a prequel to Red Dragon, the Harris novel that introduced the psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter, the most powerful character in modern melodrama. It's going to be intriguing in that it's an attempt to achieve a cable TV model on network TV, and the storytelling will have to be intense and vivid because of all the intellectual real estate the series wants to cover.

Speaking specifically about the Lecter character to Entertainment Weekly recently, Fuller said: "There is a cheery disposition to our Hannibal. He's not being telegraphed as a villain. If the audience didn't know who he was, they wouldn't see him coming. What we have is Alfred Hitchcock's principle of suspense - show the audience the bomb under the table and let them sweat [about] when it's going to go boom."

And the series starts off before FBI agent Will Graham puts together Lecter's murderous modus operandi and, in the novel, gets gutted for his trouble. Here, Graham is working with the psychiatrist and seeks Lecter's assistance in profiling and capturing serial killers: "Let the mind games begin" is the series tagline.

As it's being fast-tracked direct from the US, where it premiered two days ago. No episodes were available for preview, but from the long trailer it's as much stylised thriller as police procedural, and traffics in gruesome and grisly stuff with some originality. Not that we expect all that much - variations on the stereotypical are what we look for, after all; that's what we love about generic entertainment: its theoretical stampede of formulaic patterns and variations of those formulas.

Also the heavily promoted Nine serial killer series The Following, from the Fox network, joins us this week, and good it is too. As in the case of Hannibal, it's another attempt to keep up with the cable networks that now rule the hour-long serial drama. The last time a non-cable show won an Emmy for best drama was seven years ago, when Fox's 24 got the nod. There's little doubt here that the network is aiming at something altogether tougher, less routine and up there with cable series such as Dexter, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead.

Created and written by Kevin Williamson, the pilot episode is directed by Marcos Siega, who also executive-produces with the writer. Williamson knows a bit about confrontation and getting audiences to jump off their couches. He famously created the big-screen Scream franchise, and, as executive producer-writer brought LJ Smith's Vampire Diaries to TV, having previously created the often controversial Dawson's Creek.

The premise of the new series is interesting, even if the pilot, which goes to air this week, is a little uneven in tone. Happily, though, the melodrama is set at a high tempo. And like Criminal Minds there are many literary and classical mythology references that add to the viewing pleasure of crime show addicts.

The first episode revolves around the events leading up to and following the escape from prison of infamous serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), a former literary professor. Carroll was obsessed with America's romantic period, lecturing on Thoreau, Emerson and especially his hero Edgar Allan Poe. Carroll killed 14 women, carving out their eyes one muscle at a time because of Poe's belief that eyes are the windows of the soul.

Poe is all over this series. After all he created the archetype of the investigator, complete with his failings, quirks and idiosyncrasies, when C. Auguste Dupin first strode the fictional streets of Paris in The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841. Accused in his lifetime of debauchery, drug addiction, sadism and insanity, he was also fond, in his writing, of dark imaginings, evil innocents and beguiling femmes fatales, his stories richly embellished with riddles, reflections and labyrinths.

And there are already plenty of those in The Following, though early on it develops as more of an action series and serialised soap opera. (Williamson calls it a hybrid show: "It's a procedural; it's a cop show; it's a relationship drama.")

Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon), a retired, burned-out FBI agent responsible for capturing Carroll, a walking textbook on the killer, is a little reluctantly pulled back into the field to assist the manhunt. The cops secure Claire Matthews (Natalie Zea), Carroll's ex-wife (and mother of his son Joey), with whom Hardy had an affair, and Sarah Fuller (Maggie Grace), the only one of Carroll's victims to survive. But, the Poe-obsessed literary killer wants to finish his work, unlike Poe, whose unfinished work was The Lighthouse, possibly a clue to the events that quickly follow Carroll's violent escape.

Then a young woman tattooed with a verse from Poe's The Raven commits suicide in front of Hardy - at Carroll's request uttering the same last words as the writer. "Help my poor soul," she says before stabbing herself in the eye. Hardy begins to suspect that Carroll has used the prison internet to create a band of disciples whom he uses to carry out his plans.

The FBI estimates there are at present more than 300 active serial killers in the US. What would happen if these killers had a way of communicating and connecting with each other? What if someone as diabolical as Carroll was able to bring them all together and activate a following? And if he sees that what he is doing as art, are his followers his artistic tools, an extension of the artist?

It becomes obvious that we'll spend the first season trying to figure it all out, that any motive is probably a double motive, and that there will be many more references to Poe. (Interesting that Poe also influenced cryptography, the practice of sending secret messages in the presence of another person.) As that sagacious inquisitor Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin said, "As for these murders, let us enter into some examinations for ourselves, before we make up an opinion respecting them. An inquiry will afford us amusement."

And as was the case with Kiefer Sutherland in the hugely successful 24, the FBI and Bacon's reluctant hero are going to battle to keep up as we make our examinations, and will remain a step behind Carroll, always trying to solve the problems and puzzles he leaves for them. The Bacon character is, of course, following in the footsteps of a killer in an attempt to capture him.

The first 12 episodes take place over the course of only two weeks and the series is pacy and intensely cinematic, making a great play of telling, snappy flashbacks. And the performances are nicely etched, helped by the short scenes and elided dialogue.

Bacon's Hardy is a knowing mixture of the street-smart and alcoholically depressed cop, drinking vodka out of a water bottle to get through the day. There are many broken cop heroes like him on the crime fiction shelves in bookstores but few to be glimpsed on commercial network series that did not originate on cable.

THE Logies night used to be one of the best reality TV comedy shows in the local media calendar, always ripe for uncomfortable laughter, embarrassment, humiliation, an occasional unintended moment of ribaldry if we were lucky. From the beginning, when they were televised in the early 1960s from Melbourne's then glamorous Southern Cross Hotel, there was always something makeshift, garish and gimcrack about the Logies, something warmly lowbrow. Just like so much of our TV in that early period, when the antennae were still massing on our roofs and mostly we watched American cowboy shows.

The Logies in 1967 were even broadcast from the cruise ship Fairstar, the first to be compered by Bert Newton, who then seemed to host them for decades.

The show went on for 90 minutes and there was, thankfully, only one guest, Vic Morrow (the star of Combat!), who was killed by a helicopter some years later. "Vic was a delightful man, but why they chose him I'll never know," Newton said later. "Of all the actors in Hollywood, he made Marlon Brando look like an ear-basher."

They've been lame in recent years, long removed from their early days, in the cramped ballroom at the Southern Cross, everyone smoking and boozing, the air vaporised nicotine.

Newton made a parallel career as host, and he was great, too - peering at his notes during the breaks, one wet-tipped finger in the air trying to guess the direction of the wind, and trying desperately to keep things under control as one drunk after another came up to accept their awards.

"We were always paralytic, so much drinking; you got pissed as a galah and then made a fool of yourself on national TV, though you never realised until the next morning," producer Bob Phillips told me a couple of years ago. "There to celebrate the best of local TV, the night always brought out the worst: punch-ups, marriage break-ups and dreadful personal calamities."

The after-parties became legendary. It seemed that all the misfits and crackpots, dreamers and schemers managed to get into those rooms, crowded with stars, producers, network executives and their wives, making enemies and friends with abandon, embracing both as badges of honour and drinking until fluid came out of their ears.

Now the Logies seem corporatised and far too long, and no longer a ritual of comfortable national togetherness, a celebration of the way TV created unity out of fragmentation. But those of us involved in TV will still watch these days, though with a jaundiced, cynical eye, device in hand, ready to jump on Twitter, still hoping for some ethereal, quixotic, serendipitous happening. But mostly we'll be thinking of the past.

Criminal Minds, Wednesday, 8.45pm, Seven

Hannibal, week starting April 14, Seven

The Following, Tuesday, 8.40pm, Nine,

The Logies, Sunday, 8.30pm, Nine