{alltv} 'Memphis Beat,' filmed in New Orleans, seems a little lost

 

It's hard to fake novelty.

Heaven knows that hasn't stopped Memphis Beat, the latest series miscalculation from TNT, from faking its mock-Memphis heart out, starting with Jason Lee's studiously eccentric Dwight Hendricks, a know-it-all down-home detective who solves crimes by day and sings (well, lip-syncs) blues by night.

But despite Lee's efforts and considerable charms, the show he's in just feels sadly, baldly inauthentic, from his too-noble-to-be-true cop to the setting itself.

Don't blame Memphis, a city of tremendous music-history importance that would, indeed, be an interesting new place to set a series. The problem is that the show, while set in Memphis, is shot outside New Orleans — a substitution that robs the show of its best chance of seeming both genuine and new. You can't help thinking the writers wouldn't be working so hard to sell Memphis as someplace "other" if they were actually there and could just relax into the local color rather than strain to invent it.

Created by actor Joshua Harto and his wife, Liz Garcia, Memphis goes astray from the opening establishing scene, a bloody murder that leads to a dropped-drawers joke. Unfortunately, what it establishes is that the show suffers from severe tonal problems as it struggles to balance local eccentricities and strained comedy with an overly graphic approach to its plot-driving crimes.

Those strained tones extend to Lee's Hendricks, who is just too good and odd to be true. Worshiped by his fellow cops — including, eventually, the new by-the-books boss (Alfre Woodard) who initially tries to rein him in — Dwight is one of those only-on-TV types who is painted as being always right, even when a viewer might logically conclude that he wasn't.

Yet he gets nothing but looks of admiration from his fellow officers. Those include a would-be apprentice (DJ Qualls); a Native American cop (Abraham Benrubi, in Willie Nelson pigtails); and Dwight's supportive partner, Charlie "Whitehead" White (Sam Hennings), who spouts such faux regionalisms as "You ever try one of them vegan tofu burger whatchamacalits? The daggum thing made me hungrier than I was before I ate it."

All of the actors, from Lee on down, deserve far better than this pseudo-Southern-fried pap. But the real sin here is the shameful waste of Woodard, who has bounced of late between bad roles in good series (Desperate Housewives) and indifferent roles in terrible series (My Own Worst Enemy, Three Rivers and now Memphis Beat).

We all need to pay the bills, and in this economy, you certainly don't want to advise anyone to turn down work. Still, she desperately needs to find a role that's better suited to her considerable talents before people begin to forget how considerable those talents are.

That's the kind of novel event we should do our best to avoid.