Lockdown, Lowdown… Cold Case

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

I came across Cold Case by mistake. I cannot remember what it was that I was searching for but once I happened upon it, I was hooked.

Combining my love for history and the crime genre, this is a brilliantly crafted piece of TV that takes up quite simply, cold cases, to be solved. What drew me to it was not just the returning to the scene of the crime years after but the recreations of the time and of the crime itself through carefully crafted and evocative flashbacks.

The fact that is did not depend upon the New York skyline or the Chicago drawl also helped. Whilst never sick of a New York thang or a Chicago series or seven, change as they say, can be as good as a rest.

Created by Meredith Stiehm, for CBS, it ran for 156 episodes over seven series from 2003 to 2010. Based in the very real city of Philadelphia it gave us Lily Rush (played by Kathryn Morris) leading a team of detectives in solving crimes that had no longer been actively pursued for some time – they were thus “cold” to the police.

Of course, there tended to be a 100% success rate in solving the cases now that had modern methods and the gift of time on their side. She was joined originally as side kick, by Detective Chris Lassing (played by Justin Chambers) until he left and was replaced by Scotty Valens (played by Danny Pino). Pino is, of course, now well established as a TV actor in the likes of Law and Order SVU, but back then he was part of a wide ranging team – Nick Vera (played by Jeremy Ratchford), Will Jeffries (played by Thom Barry) and Kat Miller (played by Tracie Thoms) all under the watchful eye of Lieutenant John Stillman (played by John Finn).

Each episode began by looking at crimes that could be a few years in the past or up to a century before. The premise required a guilty suspect at some point, so we had to be within somebody’s living memory! The prompting that brought these cases to the attention of this squad tended to be a new lead of some description – a new suspect, some DNA found that matched something else suspicious, or a gun handed in in a modern day amnesty and so on…

Given the complexity of what they were trying to achieve this was quite a tricky piece of storytelling so when they made the decision to try and keep the interviews in a linear format – exploring the crime as it actually happened, we stayed on board. Each interview involved flashback sequences which must have doubled production costs but added to the quality on display. The ending would be the recreation of the crime in flashback, often with the guilty party confessing. And then, oftentimes in slow motion too, the guilty party would be cuffed and walked to jail. The conclusion also could include the victim appearing in a ghost like manner to the detectives as their justice had finally been found. The episode would often be played out with the music of the time that the crime took place – doubling down on that hit of nostalgia.

Cold Case was part of the CSI family, leading to Valens appearing in CSI:NY as part of a crossover narrative taking in the original CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: Cyber and Without a Trace. Certainly, the production values were very high and it fit within the cannon of CSI work well, though it had a less polished appeal than the glossy forensic labs of CSI. There was a grittiness that marked it out as different – I liked that.

I was especially taken in by it when I found a cochlear implant in the series. A cold case involving a child with the very same equipment my son was implanted with was always likely to catch my attention and though the storyline was a tad contrived, it struck a chord!

Of course, my exposure to the series came long after it was complete and available for people like me to binge watch – and that is what I did.

Despite being accused by Canadian TV series Cold Squad of stealing its premise and being sued early in its broadcasting career it endured and I have been back to dip in and out. It is some years since I sat through them all, but you never know… Is it like fine wine or will have it aged as much as the crimes it was designed to try and solve, or will it just give me flashbacks to when I was young and could still see my feet?

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television , you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programs made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…

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