Comedy is spotted right 'In Plain Sight'
TELEVISION REVIEW
Levity tends to tickle the drama in this new USA Network series about the Witness Protection Program.
Although I have it on the authority of Martin Scorsese and Wikipedia that the federal witness protection program does exist, I find the whole business hard to swallow. Outfitting people who know too much, or live with people who know too much, with new names and fake IDs and shipping them off to unfamiliar cities to playact forevermore -- it seems no more probable to me than shooting them into space or turning them into trees. (That's what Zeus would do.)
In any case, there is certainly some drama to be made from the subject -- or some comedy. There was "Meadowlands," a British import to Showtime about a whole town full of protected witnesses, and the Steve Martin comedy "My Blue Heaven" a long while back, and "GoodFellas," of course, and, obliquely, "The Riches," which also involves lying to the new neighbors.
Now comes USA's "In Plain Sight," as in the thing that you sometimes hide in, which looks at it all from the police's point of view. It mixes up the drama and the comedy, with an emphasis on the latter, and fits companionably with USA's other character-driven crime series, "Monk," "Psych" and "Burn Notice," though it's more realistic, or perhaps just less of a cartoon, than any of them.
Federal marshals Mary Shannon (Mary McCormack, "The West Wing") and Marshall Mann (Frederick Weller) -- that's Marshal Marshall Mann -- spend their days acclimating witnesses to a new life and identity in Albuquerque, or carting them around to one desert jurisdiction or another. Along the way, they banter; at times they bicker.
After work, and occasionally during, Mary has personal issues to resolve, revolving mostly around her boyfriend (Cristián de la Fuente), her mother, Jinx (Lesley Ann Warren, whom it is nice to see again), and troublesome sister, Brandi (Nichole Hiltz), who has come to town from New Jersey toting a suitcase full of her boyfriend's crystal meth. (Warren and Hiltz do lovely work in the B stories as mutually rudderless mother and daughter.) Typical of a sidekick, we see nothing of Marshall's private life. Perhaps he has none: His only friend, he says, is Mary -- whose only friend is he, says she.
Sunday's long pilot is somewhat overworked and overwritten, with a surfeit of likely suspects -- including bickering wiseguy types I'd hoped not to see for a while after "The Sopranos" cut to black -- cluttering up an already confused and finally tiring mystery.
