Deseret News (Salt Lake City): 'Wild Card' good deal better than the other crime shows

HOLLYWOOD -- The huge success of "CSI" has spawned a slew of imitators -- procedural crime dramas in which the show is all about the plot.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But you do get the feeling that the entire cast of "CSI" could be switched with other actors and the show wouldn't change. At least not much.

Again, not that there's anything wrong with that. Except that this fall's TV schedule is full of waaaaay too many "CSI" clones.

Which makes the arrival of the new Lifetime series "Wild Card" (Sunday, 8 p.m,. Lifetime) that much more welcome. This cable series is better than the dramas you'll see this fall on the broadcast networks, precisely because it's not just like them. This is a show in which mysteries get solved, but the characters aren't interchangeable -- they're actually characters.

Which shouldn't come as a great surprise, given that it's created, written and produced by the husband-and-wife team of Lynn Latham and Bernard Lechowick, who've created and sustained some great characters (and written some engrossing mysteries) in such previous series as "Homefront," "That's Life," "Live Through This" and "Knots Landing." (By way of disclosure, Latham and Lechowick are friends of mine. And I was nervous when I watched the "Wild Card" pilot, for fear that this would be the first of their projects I didn't like. But, friends or not, I loved it.)

"The people you're looking at up here are amazing writers and are amazing at weaving stories together," said Joely Fisher ("Ellen"), who stars as Zoe Busiek, a woman who has sort of drifted through life without ever finding herself. She's landed in Las Vegas, but she has to give up her job as a blackjack dealer when her sister, a single mother, is killed in a car accident.

Zoe returns home to Chicago to parent her 16-year-old niece (Vikki Krinsky), 12-year-old nephew (Jamie Johnston) and 8-year-old niece (Aislinn Paul), and to look for a way to support them. She quickly discovers that something about the accident that took her sister's life isn't quite right -- that there was insurance fraud, which prevented her nieces and nephew from collecting on their mom's policy.

She pesters a pair of insurance investigators (Chris Potter and Rae Dawn Chong) into taking a second (and third and fourth) look at the case. And, along the way, she gets reacquainted with an old friend (Bronson Picket), who would like to be more than just friends.

"It's sort of amazing, in that she starts off being someone who's maybe somewhat lost; a little bit driven," Fisher said. "She's coming home a little bit with her tail between her legs, but she's going to take the job of parenting head-on and finds herself really good -- surprisingly good -- at unearthing truth."

Not that she's some sort of superhuman; she's just persistent and possessed of uncommon common sense.

"Zoe learns on the job," Lechowick said. "She's receiving, in effect, on-the-job training, both as a parent and as an investigator. It's our plan that she not be flawless -- that she makes mistakes."

But that's part of character development. Both her family and romantic lives will cross over into her cases. And character development in any hourlong show about an investigator is so rare today that it almost seems novel.

It is, as Lechowick termed it, a "procedural show with heart." "The mystery on each (episode) will have a beginning, middle and end. The characters will grow and change over the five years that we're going to be on the air. But, in terms of screen time, I think it would be safe to say that the predominant story each episode will be the mystery, or the mysteries."

But the stories will revolve around Fisher's character. "The character of Zoe is dealing with so many different things at once," Latham said. "She's never been a parent before. She's got three kids. She has a new job. She has a new love interest. And it's a real balancing act, as it is for women in the work force and men in the work force, to balance all of these things."

All of which balances out to a truly enjoyable hour of television.

DUMB QUESTION, GOOD ANSWER: One critic asked Fisher if she'd ever gone to Las Vegas.

"My mother is Connie Stevens," Fisher said. "I was weaned in a casino, basically."

E-mail: pierce@desnews.com