The people who run Sleuth have no Cloo

When NBCUniversal (now one word instead of two) added Sleuth to its stable of cable channels in 2006, it was an alright idea for a channel: Nick at Nite with guns. For its first couple of years, Sleuth's 24-hour lineup was comprised of reruns of NBCUniversal-owned cop or detective shows like Dragnet, Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice and the always-worth-revisiting Homicide: Life on the Street.

But like so many other channels, of course, Sleuth has strayed from its original purpose. These days, DirecTV channel 308 is an ill-defined dumping ground for reruns of current original shows from its sister station USA (Royal Pains, In Plain Sight)--and Walker, Texas Ranger. With content like Royal Pains, a doctor show, In Plain Sight, a cop show with very little detective work because of its focus on witness protection, and Walker, a cop show with no detective work (and one that's only watchable when Conan O'Brien's around to butt in with snarky and appalled commentary), the name Sleuth doesn't make much sense anymore. Cloo--the new name that Sleuth will assume on a yet-to-be-confirmed future date a la the still-inane 2009 conversion of its other sister station Sci Fi to Syfy--makes even less sense. What's next? NBCUniversal rebranding USA as YouSA? (They also own Telemundo. Maybe they should rename it YouEse.)

Occasionally, Sleuth has done something nice like temporarily revive a show I've longed to see again (Keen Eddie, The Rockford Files) or air a 007 marathon or the surprisingly good 1973 made-for-TV caper movie/unsold anthology show pilot The Alpha Caper, which isn't on DVD and stars Henry Fonda as a forcibly retired parole officer who teams up with the ex-cons he used to watch over--two of whom are played by Leonard Nimoy and Larry Hagman--to hijack a shipment of gold. But otherwise, as a fan of the private eye and caper genres, I've found Sleuth to be a wasted opportunity, regurgitating too many of the same broadcast network procedural reruns that can already be found on USA (House, NCIS).

Unless it's airing a White Collar episode I've never seen before or a Burn Notice rerun with a useful spy tip I need to jot down, Sleuth isn't worth my time. The channel's so cheap it doesn't have any on-air hosts or any original programming that could have given Sleuth a distinctive personality, like how breezy procedurals have become USA's forte or how FX has become synonymous with edgy comedies and gritty and violent but intelligently written dramas (the only original show that Sleuth has produced is a 2006 I Love the '80s-style special about "America's Top Sleuths").

It's owned by NBCUniversal and it's called Sleuth (that is until the name change to Cloo takes place), so why isn't the channel diving into the NBCUniversal library, with its vast history of influential crime shows, and pulling out classic sleuthy properties like Columbo (R.I.P. Peter Falk) or the other NBC Mystery Movie shows? Shouldn't a channel called Sleuth be a little, uh, sleuthier?

Also, as someone who stopped finding Law & Order interesting after an ailing Jerry Orbach left the mothership (although the later pairing of Jesse L. Martin and Jeremy Sisto was a great and too-brief one during the mothership's Law half, as was the duo of Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra on Criminal Intent), I don't think Sleuth needs to be another repository for Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit reruns (TNT has exclusive rights to reruns of the mothership, which explains its absence on the NBCUniversal channels' schedules). Okay, maybe Criminal Intent is tolerable once every weekday, but a five-hour Goren-thon like the ones Sleuth often does is overkill. Plus, Sleuth is the sixth channel on the dial that currently airs Criminal Intent reruns, after USA, Bravo, Oxygen, WGN and the local MyNetworkTV affiliate. Enough already, man.

As for SVU, I never cared for a show that's like Law & Order for people who enjoy those lame Lifetime women-in-peril TV-movies. Also, it turned Munch, one of my favorite Homicide characters, into a boring extra. That's criminal. I'm glad Christopher Meloni jumped ship because he can now concentrate on unleashing again his much-missed comedic side (a highlight of Wet Hot American Summer and the Harold & Kumar movies).

If I ran Sleuth/Cloo, here's how the schedule would look for what I always thought a crime show channel should be.

The original Law & Order isn't on here because of TNT (another reason to dislike them besides their cancellation of Men of a Certain Age). Wiseguy isn't on here because I assume the most recent syndication package is just like the DVD and iTunes versions of the show, which removed The Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin" from the famous "Vinnie and Sonny stare into each other's eyes and wind up as footage for The Celluloid Closet II" sequence due to clearance issues. A butchered Wiseguy is like a piece of bitter melon that winds up in my plate of fish and rice: I don't want it. The Shield is missing because Spike has the rights to it, and as for my all-time favorite The Wire, DirecTV's Audience Network currently has dibs on it. I wouldn't want to acquire Wire reruns anyway because NBCUniversal wouldn't let them air uncensored:

MONDAY-FRIDAY
6am: Columbo
7:30am: Barney Miller
8am: Psych
9am: Monk
10am: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
11am: The Rockford Files
12pm: "Brilliant But Cancelled" (a revival of an old programming block that was the highlight of NBCUniversal's long-dead Trio channel and has lent its name to a blog at the NBCUniversal-owned Television Without Pity site, the hour would alternate between Terriers, Eyes, Black Tie Affair, Andy Barker, P.I., A Nero Wolfe Mystery, Karen Sisco, Keen Eddie, the Touching Evil remake, Vengeance Unlimited, EZ Streets, Crime Story, Andre Braugher's Thief, Thieves, Day Break, Tenspeed and Brown Shoe and Police Squad!)
1pm: Burn Notice
2pm: I Spy
3pm: The Avengers (I miss A&E's Avengers reruns that used to air at 3pm in the '90s)
4pm: It Takes a Thief
5pm: Mission: Impossible
6pm: Alias (two impeccably scored spy shows back-to-back!)
7pm: "007 at 7" (a broadcast of a 007 movie hosted by Mozzie from White Collar, who points out mistakes in the movie he wouldn't have made if he were Bond)

10pm: Veronica Mars
11pm: Burn Notice
12am: The Equalizer
1am: Law & Order: Criminal Intent (just so that there'd be that one night where the Equalizer episode featuring a Full Metal Jacket-era Vincent D'Onofrio as a crazed arsonist ends up back-to-back with Criminal Intent)
2am: Homicide: Life on the Street (now what if one night, that D'Onofrio Equalizer guest shot ended up getting followed by a D'Onofrio episode of Criminal Intent and then D'Onofrio's guest appearance on Homicide?--that would be even more awesome: D'Onofrio lights people on fire, and then he apprehends people who would light people on fire, and then he gets run over by a subway train)
3am: Spenser: For Hire (as the A.V. Club comments section once said about this show, Avery Brooks is one bad motherfucker)
4am: Harry O
5am: Mannix

SATURDAY
(The whole day is devoted to one show. Sleuth's recent all-Saturday marathons of either White Collar, Burn Notice, Psych, In Plain Sight, Covert Affairs, MacGyver or Charlie's Angels actually aren't a wack idea.)

SUNDAY
6am: Movie
8am: Movie
10am: Movie
12pm: Movie
2pm: Movie
4pm: Movie
6pm: Honey West
6:30pm: The Name of the Game

8pm: Columbo
9:30pm: McCloud
11pm: McMillan and Wife
12:30am: Peter Gunn
1:00am: Batman: The Animated Series
1:30am: Duckman
2:00am: Get Smart
2:30am: Sledge Hammer!
3:00am: Car 54, Where Are You?
3:30am: Barney Miller
4:00am: "The 4 O'Clock Movie" (I'd relegate the channel's frequent broadcasts of straight-to-DVD Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme duds to this time slot and get a stand-up or some "Commander USA"-type figure to be the on-air host, so that she or he can make it a less grueling experience to sit through duds like that Van Damme movie that ends with him and Vivica A. Fox sharing one of the strangest-looking prolonged kisses ever filmed)

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Crosstown Traffic"

Song: "Crosstown Traffic" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Released: 1968
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in the broadcast version of Keen Eddie's "Keeping Up Appearances" episode. Paramount Home Entertainment didn't bother to clear "Crosstown Traffic" for the DVD version, which I refuse to watch.

Which moment in "Keeping Up Appearances" does it appear?: The sequence where Detective Eddie Arlette (Mark Valley) goes for a ride in a Bentley that once was owned by Jimi Hendrix.



Keen Eddie is a lost comedic gem from creator J.H. Wyman, who's currently a writer/producer for Fringe, which returns in a new and not-exactly-great time slot tonight and briefly had Valley as a regular before he starred in Human Target, where he's basically playing Eddie Arlette again, but with mad fighting skills. Wyman's London-based cop show was too foreign, anarchic and offbeat for mainstream America (it wasn't dour and moralistic enough for them--the original CSI, the #1 prime-time hit that year, was more up their conservative-leaning, bodybag-filled alley). But Keen Eddie won over TV critics (National Review, of all publications, actually liked it) and whoever were the three or four viewers who caught it on Fox. I was one of them, and I instantly dug "Crosstown Traffic," the tune where Hendrix MacGyvered a kazoo out of a comb and a piece of cellophane, when I first heard it on Keen Eddie.

All the other "Rock Box" Tracks of the Day from this week:
Matt & Kim, "Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare"
Tom Jones, "Sex Bomb (Peppermint Disco Mix)"
The Motherhood, "Soul Town"
Edo G feat. Masta Ace, "Wishing"

We interrupt this arc of The Palace to bring you hot lingerie models who run drug gangs

Not all Colombian drug lords look like Tony Clifton. Greg Rucka's Twitter linked to an odd news story that will likely get this post way more hits than any other post I've written: "Angie Sanselmente Valencia, a former lingerie model, is believed to be heading one of the world's largest drug gangs." (Leverage showrunner John Rogers saw Rucka's tweet and joked to his writers, "Start your engines.")

Colombia's former "Queen of Coffee" dated a Mexican drug lord known as "The Monster" and then broke up with him to start her own gang. She would recruit other lingerie models to smuggle coke. If you pop that balloon on that chick's chest--surprise inside!

I was a fan of Keen Eddie, and this reads like an episode of that show. In the Keen Eddie pilot, the show's hero Eddie Arlette (Human Target's Mark Valley) is trying to bust an oxycodone dealer with the help of a mysterious snitch who looks like a Victoria's Secret model and also happens to be the drug lord's girlfriend. But she tricks Eddie into busting down the doors of an empty warehouse and escapes with her boyfriend. Eddie becomes the laughingstock of the NYPD and follows their trail to London, where, as Scotland Yard's newest employee, he becomes occupied with catching other fish, from casino robbers in Duran Duran masks to crazed stalkers of opera stars. Fox burnt off episodes of Keen Eddie in the summer of 2003 and cancelled it before creator J.H. Wyman could give Eddie the chance to find the "Big Ben" drug ring duo from the pilot.


I always had a hunch that the unseen drug lord was really the girlfriend--a Remington Steele-meets-Ra's al Ghul in Batman Begins twist. Now thanks to the "Queen of Coffee" case, my hunch doesn't look too crazy.

Shows I Miss: Keen Eddie

Tonight, prime-time takes another stab at adapting the DC comic Human Target when Fox premieres a much-hyped, Bear McCreary-scored series loosely based on Peter Milligan's Vertigo version, one of my favorite comics during its too-brief run. In a previous TV version of Human Target that was produced by Flash TV series showrunners Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, Rick Springfield starred as bodyguard Christopher Chance, who disguised himself as his victimized clients to throw off the bad guys and flew around in a pimpin' stealth bomber/bachelor pad that's the only thing I remember about the show. This time, Jericho co-creator Jon Steinberg is the showrunner, the master-of-disguise gimmick has been ditched, the stealth bomber has been left to rot in a hangar somewhere and Chance is played by Mark Valley, who will always be Keen Eddie to me.

Human Target reunites Valley with Con Air director Simon West, who also worked on the much-missed, Guy Ritchie-esque Keen Eddie, which first aired on Fox in the summer of 2003. Early reviews have said Human Target is less like the gritty Vertigo comic--which put Chance through one hell of a psychological wringer by having him suffer from an identity crisis--and more along the lines of lighter fare like The A-Team, MacGyver and Keen Eddie.

I doubt the new show will be as offbeat or raunchy as Keen Eddie, which premiered (and then died) a few months before Janet Jackson's Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime wardrobe malfunction caused the major networks to overreact and kill some of the fun out of prime-time by overpolicing their raunchier shows. There are certain storylines and bits of dialogue during Keen Eddie that teleplay writers probably can't get away with in today's post-Janetgate prime-time landscape--they're more likely to be able to get away with them on FX. Cable was where Keen Eddie belonged.

In fact, cable was where most of Keen Eddie's cult following first discovered the series. After Fox's top exec at the time--who was as impatient with Keen Eddie as the shit-for-brains NBC execs have been with The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien--defied the wishes of other Fox execs who loved Keen Eddie and abruptly cancelled it, Bravo picked it up and debuted its unaired episodes.

The series, which last popped up on Sleuth a couple of years ago, is a lost comedic gem from creator J.H. Wyman, who currently co-produces Fringe, where Valley was briefly a regular before he moved on to Human Target. The Desert Storm vet-turned-actor was terrific as NYPD detective Eddie Arlette, who travels to London to track down an elusive drug dealer and winds up joining Scotland Yard. Eddie doesn't quite find his drug dealer (Crockett and Tubbs had far better luck with their nemesis Calderon on Miami Vice), but the fish-out-of-water falls in love with the city and takes a liking to both the British crooks he locks up (they're more like the not-so-dangerous oddball criminals from Barney Miller than the mustachio-twirling villains from Miami Vice) and his hot but snooty and argumentative flatmate Fiona Bickerton (a then-unknown Sienna Miller). The series was a love letter to London, where it was filmed on location on what was clearly a ginormous budget. Wyman's creation was too foreign, anarchic and weird for mainstream America (it wasn't dour and moralistic enough for them--the original CSI, the #1 prime-time hit that year, was more up their conservative-leaning, bodybag-filled alley). But it won the hearts of some TV critics (Marvin Kitman called it "a show that could have started something new, like how Miami Vice took police shows out of L.A.") and whoever were the three or four viewers who watched it on Fox. I was one of them.


Eddie is a roguish, down-on-his-luck crime show hero in the mold of Jim Rockford and Black Tie Affair's Dave Brodsky. If Rockford's Achilles heel was having knuckles made of Kleenex, Eddie's Achilles heel is thinking with his boner too much--one reason why this show wouldn't fly on prime-time today. Eddie's crush on his gorgeous informant, the mysterious gangster's moll who tricks him and the NYPD into busting down the wrong door, is the whole reason for his banishment to London. The series' most enjoyable running joke involves Carol (Rachael Buckley, who's even hotter than Miller but seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth), a Scotland Yard secretary Eddie nicknames "Miss Moneypenny," and the never-answered mystery over whether her flirtatious exchanges with Eddie about her tastes for crotchless panties or being on all fours are real or the figment of Eddie's oversexed imagination. But Eddie's a prude in comparison to his floppy-haired partner Monty Pippin (Julian Rhind-Tutt), whose off-duty sexcapades make Jimmy McNulty from The Wire look like a monk (even though because this isn't HBO, we never see Monty in the middle of one of his swingers club orgies).


Another highlight of Keen Eddie is its awesome, pitch-perfect soundtrack. The pilot episode underscored a drug bust sequence with the Archies' "Sugar Sugar"--an early indication that Keen Eddie was no ordinary cop show. For the carelessly compiled DVD release, which should be avoided at all costs, Paramount Home Entertainment removed many of the songs that helped make Keen Eddie such a memorable show, due to clearance fees Paramount refused to pony up for ("Keeping Up Appearances," an episode in which Eddie inherits Jimi Hendrix's Bentley, is utter shit without "Crosstown Traffic"). But the studio didn't lay a finger on the songs in the reruns, so whenever Keen Eddie turns up on cable, fire up the DVR.

Because of the arrival of Valley's first star vehicle since Keen Eddie, I'll soon be adding to the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's "F Zone" playlist some of the tunes that were cut out of the Keen Eddie DVDs: Madness' "One Step Beyond," New Order's "Crystal" and of course, "Crosstown Traffic."