Two wrongs don't make a right

I enjoyed the premiere episode of Touching Evil up until the point when Detective David Creegan spits on his prime suspect, Ronald Hinks. After a failed interrogation, Creegan—a federal agent who knows Hinks is a child-murderer but can't prove it—follows Hinks to his car and jumps into the passenger seat. The detective threatens Hinks and physically intimidates him—pretty standard gritty cop-show fare—and then Creegan crosses the line: He hocks a huge gob at Hinks, who sits there and takes it, hanging his head while spit dribbles past his ear. Creegan acts this way because he is missing part of his frontal lobe, the part of the cerebral cortex involved in impulse control and social appropriateness. "I have no shame," he tells his new partner, Detective Susan Branca, in another scene, and though he says it without pride, Creegan's brain damage is Touching Evil's badge of honour. (The show, it's worth noting, is based on a BBC series of the same name.)

As if the missing brain parts weren't enough, Creegan was also pronounced dead for 10 minutes and spent some time in a mental institution—all as a result of a near-fatal gunshot wound we see in the show's prologue. Because Touching Evil is primarily a drama, these character details carry a lot of weight, but until the spit scene, Creegan's bizarre and erratic behaviour is mostly in good fun. (As the USA Network discovered with its delightful hit Monk, mental problems make for one charming detective.) When we meet Creegan, he's returning to work at the San Francisco office of the fictional Organized and Serial Crime Unit. He's better, but not well. Creegan cuts his hair in public, doles out inappropriate bear hugs, makes paper airplanes out of people's business cards, and generally drives his partner crazy. But he also discovers crucial bits of evidence and displays unfailing crime-solving instincts. As with Monk, only someone who is often so right is allowed to act so wrong.

At first we're inclined to forgive—and even find humour in—Creegan's impulsivity and lack of shame. "You ever get a tune stuck inside your head?" he says when he first jumps into Hinks' car. "I do all the time. It just plays over and over and over inside my head. Classic rock mostly. Boston. Aerosmith." But what starts out as fun—he also recites poetry while stripping naked on a flight to Denver—eventually becomes disturbing—such as when he tries to beat a confession out of Hinks. As the show progresses, Creegan's behaviour becomes more and more questionable. The darker his behaviour got, the more I found myself thinking that maybe this guy wasn't ready to be back at work. It's one thing to have a Dirty Harry who doesn't answer to the law but something else entirely to have a cop who can't even answer to himself.

Touching Evil tries to mitigate Creegan's transgressions by showing us his suffering. He's divorced and estranged from his family, and he cries at night when he's alone. To me, this felt like the producers were trying to have it both ways: The cop gets the benefit of the doubt while the criminal gets an eye for an eye. Or perhaps Creegan is the perfect hero for our times: an avenger fuelled by rage but hobbled by post-traumatic stress. He has experienced the unthinkable and lived, which the producers seem to think puts him above mortal concerns.

In past incarnations of the righteous cop, if crime wasn't met with justice, the System was always at fault—the Miranda warning was botched or the search warrant wasn't properly executed. In Touching Evil, Creegan's partner makes noise about establishing a proper chain of evidence, and Creegan dismisses the whole notion of taking action based on facts. The message of the show seems to be that there is great evil in the world and that we will fight it, but don't hold us responsible for how.

© Dennis Cass/ Slate

 

Hollywood Reporter

Too often when we see British TV shows given an American makeover after landing on U.S. television screens, it's a pale imitation of the show on which it was based. We can scarcely imagine the horror were someone to get the bright idea of adapting the award-winning BBC America comedy "The Office." And one might have expected a similar dumbing down/watering down for the Granada TV series "Touching Evil," a riveting British effort that starred Robson Green (and aired here on PBS a couple of years back). The good news is that USA Network's new edition is every bit as good as the original and, indeed, far darker and more compelling.

How's that for unlikely?

Quirky without being self-conscious about it and blessed with astoundingly good acting and direction, "Touching Evil" comes to us from an executive producer team that includes Bruce Willis and the Hughes brothers (of "Menace II Society" fame) and opens with a stunning two-hour pilot directed with creepy, uneasy style by Allen Hughes. And in adding "Evil's" Detective David Creegan to a crime-solving roster that also features the obsessive-compulsive Adrian Monk, USA Network can now boast TV's two most rivetingly idiosyncratic investigators.

Detective Creegan (played to neurotic, jumpy perfection by Jeffrey Donovan) is a brilliant investigator who also happens to be the loosest of cannons. He suffered a near-fatal gunshot wound to the head after being shot at point-blank range. He was declared dead for several minutes and then clinically insane for some time after. Now he's back at work, a small forehead scar the only telltale sign of the trauma. Following his lengthy convalescence and psychological leave of absence from the FBI's elite new Organized and Serial Crime Unit, Creegan is now partnered with the lower-key but steely Susan Branca (great work from Vera Farmiga).

Creegan and Branca have an uneasy chemistry that easily recalls Mulder and Scully from "The X-Files." But in this case, Donovan's alter ego is utterly fascinating. He's a volatile basket case prone to vast mood swings and seems like he's often spacing out until suddenly zeroing in on a situation or his prey. In the opener, he's obsessed with a child abductor (Zeljko Ivanek) and shows himself to be virtually incapable of following any preset rules and regs. Creegan travels to the beat not only of his own drummer but his own guitarist and saxophonist as well.

The opening teleplay from Bruno Heller in crackingly good, casting our unstable hero as an obsessive who literally cannot control how his neurons fire. His explosive inhibition keeps us at the edge of our seat, since we're never sure what he'll say or do next. The climax here is a doozy, at once surprising and entirely understandable. And Allen Hughes' direction never fails to captivate. It all bodes well for a series whose next episode can't come soon enough. "Touching Evil" gives the genre a shot of adrenaline right where it counts.

© Ray Richmond/ Hollywood Reporter

 

Enterline Media

I was intrigued by the British crime series, Touching Evil, when it first premiered on PBS as part of the program Mystery! and Robson Green gave a compelling portrayal as DI David Creegan who comes back to work for the OSC unit months after he got a bullet to the head. Creegan lost so much when he was recovering from his injury and he has different approach to solving crime that puts him at odds with the people he is working with. Touching Evil ran for three seasons for a total of 14 episodes in the UK (and some of the episodes were co-produced with WGBH Boston, a PBS station). Bruce Willis liked what he saw when he watched this show and bought the rights to remake it for a US audience. It made me wonder if the US version was going to be any good if it did get made... click here to read the rest of this review.

© David Blackwell

 

Touching Evil is all good

First "Monk," and now "Touching Evil" - the USA Network has done it again.

What USA has done is beat the networks at their own game (or at least their former one) by producing a riveting detective show with a quirky and charming character at its centre. Touching Evil, premiering tomorrow night at 9pm as a two-hour telemovie, is an American version of the British miniseries of the same name. Those programs, produced from 1997-1999, starred Robson Green as David Creegan, a former investigative hotshot who hasn't been the same since he got shot - and, for 10 minutes, was pronounced dead.

Nicola Walker played Susan, David's initially reluctant partner as he attempts a return to active duty after years under psychiatric observation.

For USA, the role of David goes to Jeffrey Donovan, who attacks the part like a pit bull and screams "TV star" from the first frame. From his casual humour to his bursts of violence, he's reminiscent of an even more tightly wound Bruce Willis from "Moonlighting." It's no wonder, because Willis is one of the executive producers of this Americanized "Touching Evil," and had a hand in the casting - along with Arnold Rifkin, Willis' current partner and former casting-director champion. Their instincts are dead-on.

The Hughes brothers ("Menace II Society") are part of the team (both Albert and Allen as executive producers, and Allen particularly effective directing the pilot). Vera Farmiga from "UC: Undercover" is another fine choice as David's FBI partner Susan - as strong a foil for Donovan as Gillian Anderson was for David Duchovny in "The X-Files." Even the guest players, who in the telemovie pilot include Pruitt Taylor Vince and Zeljko Ivanek, are a dream assemblage of terrific character actors. Allen Hughes shoots everything like a slightly uneasy dream, and Donovan's David, as in the British original, comes unwound as the search for some missing boys gets increasingly frustrating.

At one shocking point, while questioning a suspect, David shows his distaste by spitting in the man's face. It's a graphic example of the sorts of inhibitors missing from David's brain - guilt and shame, for him, are things of the past. "Being dead was easy," he tells Susan. "Coming back was the hard part." When she asks him what he saw during those 10 minutes he was clinically dead, David leans in conspiratorially, takes a long dramatic pause and says quietly, "There was Starbucks on every corner."

Like Monk, Touching Evil is an often very funny crime show with an often sympathetic and sad detective at its centre. And there's another thing they have in common: Touching Evil, like Monk, is one of the better shows on television - and it's on USA.

© David Bianculli

 

GenreOnline.net

Three years ago Detective David Creegan (Jeffrey Donovan) was shot in the head by a single .45 calibre bullet while on duty with the FBI’s Organized & Serial Crime Unit. He died, but ten minutes later, he inexplicably returned to the world of the living. He is now aloof, shameless, bright, but quite strange. With a new partner to keep him in line (Vera Farmiga), the two use procedure and gut to catch a child killer.

Considering the talent involved in producing this new USA Network original series, I was quite disappointed by the way the TV feature length series premiere turned out. The first few minutes felt exciting, but from then on the series opener just lost steam for me. There’s potential there for something dark and intriguing, but the opening episode felt like it was borrowing elements from other better USA original shows like "The Dead Zone" and mixing it with the quirky nature of "Monk" while trying to play it all straight.

Perhaps I am being too harsh, but quite honestly, I could not get into this show and found it both dull and derivative of other better shows that have aired in general on TV in the past. I hope future episodes will be better and my initial reaction will be proven to be short sighted because there is something about the show that I did like. I am not sure if it was the actors or something else, but I do see potential there. We’ll have to see where it all goes from here when "Touching Evil" premieres on the USA Network with a special TV feature length premiere episode on Friday, March 12, 2004 at 9pm (ET/PT) and regular episodes following thereafter on Friday, March 19, 2004 at 10pm (ET/PT).

© Mark A. Rivera

 

Who's the Madman? Touching Evil's Hero is Touched in the Head.

When Detective Susan Branca meets her bizarre new partner, she gripes about his "mental-health issues" as if that's a bad thing. Hasn't she seen Monk?

The success of that show hasn't been lost on USA Network, which looked to British TV for this much darker crime drama. Touching Evil, based on a series from Grenada TV that aired on PBS a few years ago, introduces a new unconventional crime solver: Detective David Creegan, back from a long medical leave after being shot in the head. He was declared officially dead for about 10 minutes, and clinically insane later. Now he's a walking time bomb: emotionally volatile, prone to mood swings and uninhibited behaviour. Creegan often seems dazed until he explosively shifts gears to confront his prey (a serial child abductor in the two-hour pilot).

As played with wry understatement by Jeffrey Donovan and Vera Farmiga, Creegan and Branca give off echoes of The X-Files' Mulder and Scully. He's the obsessed nut, and she's the "stabilizing force" assigned to keep him in line, irritated yet intrigued by his mad flights of intuition. Together, they investigate the creepiest corners of warped humanity — wielding flashlights as they go. How very X-Files of them.

At times, Creegan acts like a bundle of quirks in search of a character. But compared to NBC's botched remake of Coupling, it seems Touching Evil has survived the overseas translation.

© Matt Roush

 

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