KEY POINTS:
Sky Television's cooking and renovation channels exist for us to try it at home. Not the network's latest. It's the corpse-littered Crime and Investigation channel. Those experimenting at home risk leaving it in handcuffs.
Its fare is mostly North American, some Canadian but largely USA. Australia has moments, with the channel indirectly answering the call of 'Where the bloody hell are you?' with 'Bloodied, dead, and dumped somewhere.'
New Zealand has yet to merit anything beyond a South Auckland car chase, one seen before on American-sourced chase shows.
The channel's content divides into two broad categories. There are Cops-type reality shows, with lots of guns being pointed at "perps" and nervous police yelling at everyone.
It may be much of this is shot in summer because an astonishing number of the perps don't wear shirts. They also often appear in better physical shape than the police, making for frighteningly physical arrests. Whether this flows from indignation at the crime, fear of violence, or jealousy at losing a comparison as to who has the better gym, is never made clear.
The overweight jibe does not apply to the various Swat (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams, more or less equivalent to our armed offenders squads. These are fast-moving weightlifters with big guns.
Then there are the case histories and reconstructions, making up the network's bulk. They look as if the network commissions them with an eye to the 24 hours, seven days a week requiring filling.
It's a lot of airtime and because time is not a problem the storytelling can be leisurely, really leisurely. We get a lot of frowning detectives carrying pieces of paper and samples to the lab. Ditto for much driving to the crime scene.
Budgets are obviously tight, with the reconstructions shot on none-too-high-definition video, and there are moments where the acting, at least until the character is safely dead, drops below anything we'd see at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Whoever chooses the crimes knows the job. Cases usually have a clear angle and can be interesting. A woman property developer running for the US Senate, failing, and then contracting an undercover FBI agent to murder both her husband and a lawyer was a tale too wild for fiction.
Seeing the slickly efficient death row prisoners carrying out a sophisticated escape only to find they had no idea how to survive beyond the prison regime was both fascinating and frightening.
It was frightening because we have people who fear release from prison turning back to crime to give themselves the certainty and structure of a return to a cell.
In the end this is a whole channel of crime. Our fascination with it probably guarantees Sky's blood-drenched newcomer a bright, cheery and happy future.
* Crime and Investigation, Sky Television (Digital 71) 24 hours.
