Raines reigns

I hadn’t read the articles about Raines. All I’d heard was that it was about a detective who talks to murder victims, and despite the unique presence of Jeff Goldblum, I was not looking forward to another Medium.
So the show opens up with a voiceover, with Goldblum’s Raines explaining how he had wanted to be a writer of crime fiction, and as he discuss the decisions that a writer must make, we see a murder scene that (in special effects wizardry) is constantly shifting to reflect what he’s talking about. And it’s all nicely done, and getting my attention, and stylistically it’s tickling something in the back of my brain…
And then the name of the series creator pops up. Graham Yost. The man behind the excellent Boomtown, a series that reveled in storytelling. Oh, okay.
And then the name of the director pops up. It’s Frank Darabont, you know, director of The Shawshank Redemption among some other fine (and some merely well-intentioned) work. So you know I’m interested.
As the show goes on, it becomes clear that my worst concerns won’t be realized. Raines doesn’t talk to ghosts. No justification of the psychic detective cons in this show. He is having imaginary conversations with who he perceived the victim to be… his victim doesn’t know anything he doesn’t. It’s a way of showing the mental process of detection, while showing our detective to be on the outer edge of sanity at best.
This isn’t to say that everything is smooth. I think there’ll be some shakedown time to this show as they figure out just how much time he should spend talking to the murder victim and all of what they can do with it; there was some very good usage this time out, but overall there was probably too much. They might want to spend more time with the other charactersinvolved in the murder… particularly if they assemble the good cast which we saw this time. Just as one-time players, they used Valerie Mahaffey (who we’ve been grooving on here going back to The Powers That Be) and that guy who played the sensitive teacher on My So-Called Life… and, for us Boomtown fans, they not only had Mikelti Williamson, but he was playing his Boomtown character (something that was easily missed since they only referred to him as “Detective Smith” here, rather than his nickname “Fearless” which he used on that show.) Yes, a Graham Yost universe is born!