The Inside (re)View

Ocassionaly, for shits and giggles, I'm going to go into frustrated reviewer mode, and talk about something I recently watched/listened/endured through. So here it goes, the first ever Jaime review of a television show. In this case, I'll be talking about Fox's new cop drama: The Inside.

I watched this yesterday, while the wife was hiding in the bedroom because she caught a glimpse of the first scene, in which a recently deceased woman was being inspected by the Violent Crimes Unit division of the FBI. Her hands had been "de-gloved" . . which is just fancy talk for all the meat being removed leaving only the skeleton part. Also, half her face had been peeled off. Yes, this show is dark, and as my wife trembled in the bedroom, I cranked up the volume on the living room TV set so that she could be able to hear the "scary" mood music and screams of the victims. I'm such a bastard sometimes.

Turns out, the FBI's VCU, led by Peter Coyote's character Webb, had been getting too close to the "killer of the week" fella, and one of their own, after missing some of her lithium dosages, had, in a fit of wild bi-polar craziness (yes, redundant . . fuck off) decided to re-create the killer's work. The VCU guys (and chick) think the killer did it, but it takes the fresh perspective of young FBI analyst Rebecca Locke to really see what's going on. She was requested to replace the fallen teammate by Webb, who has a past history with her. More on that later.

Rebecca, who's never done field work, is nonetheless, very good at this. She can get into the killer's head. Maybe a little too well. Something happened to this girl in the past, and we soon learn that she was taken as a young child and held (tortured?) by a psychopath for more than a year. Funny thing is, she got away, and came back home by herself. Weird. Webb is convinced that Rebecca has a "gift forged in pain", and is determined to use it to solve crimes. Later on in this pilot episode, we also learn that Webb signed off on Rebecca's psych-evaluation when she was an FBI trainee in Quantico. He knew what had happened to her, and had kept an eye on her for a long time. Biding his time to pull her into his outfit (no, not that kind of outfit . . pervert).

That's pretty much the premise of the show. Also starring is some guy I've never seen on TV, decent actor though. He plays the moral center of the group. Add the tough guy from Firefly (Jayne) and Wonderfall's lesbian sister character and you've got yourself the main cast. These last two most likely got the gig due to the fact that Tim Minear is one of the driving forces on this show. He was one of the creators on those two programs(as well as Buffy, but I never watched that with the sound up), and this new series on Fox is pretty good. They've ordered 13 episodes. But, if history is doomed to repeat itself, then just like Firefly and Wonderfalls before it, The Inside will be killed by bad time slots, episode order mishandling and Fox will be airing "When Nuns attack Abortion Clinics" in its place by the end of the summer. Should i just give you the $49.95 now for the DVD boxset or do you want to wait FOX?

I hate you Fox. Don't make me hate you more. You're on thin ice with me.