I got hooked on this show completely by accident last year.
After I read on a Bruce Springsteen website that an episode of the CBS crime drama Cold Case would be featuring several of Springsteen's songs from albums like Born In The USA, I decided to check it out. After all, The Boss doesn't lend his approval or the use of his music to just any movie or TV production.
So I came, I watched, and I got hooked. I've been a loyal viewer every Sunday night since. Thank God for DVRs, otherwise the choice would've been a tough one with competition from HBO's Deadwood and The Sopranos earlier this year, and now opposite my favorite guilty pleasure Desperate Housewives.
As the series name indicates, Cold Case is a tight little cop drama about detectives reopening unsolved cases that have been "cold" for years and years. The ensemble cast headed up by Kathryn Morris and Danny Pino is a great one, and the characters they play come straight from the cookie cutter school of cop drama.
Morris' character is your typically conflicted female detective with all the usual baggage — from guy problems to a wayward sister who occasionally shows up to muck up her already complicated life (not at all unlike another wayward sister on USA's The 4400).
Pino's character is the handsome no-nonsense detective who occasionally manifests a dark side — like on an episode last season where he basically kicked the crap out of a guy he merely suspected of being a child molester.
What sets Cold Case apart, however, is the way it uses music to enhance the story. Not since Miami Vice has a television cop drama made such effective use of music as this one does and maybe that's why Springsteen approved. But where Miami Vice used quick MTV style cuts and edits to accent the frenetic action and pace of the show, Cold Case will key in on the music of the period its story focuses on to evoke a specific time.
A typical episode of Cold Case will cut between the present day efforts of the detectives attempting to solve the often forgotten crime and flashbacks to the year it took place. It also almost always uses more than one actor playing the role of the witnesses and suspects, in both present day and when they were younger. The stories will often blur these timelines, occasionally within the confines of a single scene. So the 30-year-old suspect being interrogated will morph into the teenager he may have been at the time of the crime. In this way, the suspect characters become less one dimensional than on a lot of other cop dramas.
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Article comments
1 - Glen Boyd
Thanx for publishing this Erin.
-Glen
2 - Bliffle
Good article. I too find this cop drama interesting and above the normal, probably because it concentrates on the characters rather than the cops, and it makes effective use of time shifts to better portray the participants in the old crime.
One of the very few commercial network programs I watch regularly. On the DVR, that is, where I can skip the annoying commercials.
3 - Glen Boyd
Yeah the DVR does come in rather handy for whizzing past those commercials Bliffle. Thanks for commenting.
-Glen
4 - Taylor
Please I am looking for a song played on cold case on November 11th when the boys had to stand untill they fell and there finger was cut off and stuff. Well I think it was a rap song being played and I would love it if you could please find it for me! Thanks, Taylor