When it "Raines"

If I have to see the preview for Dead Silence again I think I may go nuts. But that was honestly the worst part of watching the Raines pilot (NBC.com has had it up for a few weeks and it's split into 4 parts... with the same commercial in between each).

But the show's the important part, and it's a perfectly good one. Jeff Golblum stars as the title character, an LAPD detective who, for lack of a better cliche, sees dead people. It's a tip of the hat to noir-ish murder mysteries that used to be the biggest thing in film and have since died off, for the most part, and it succeeds exactly where ABC's Dragnet remake failed a few years back.

Not that it's all smoky, brooding bar scenes and aha moments. It's much deeper steeped in sarcasm than it is in dark depression. But, how else could a viewer seriously take any dialogue Jeff Goldblum delivers?

Goldblum's very good, and a great fit to lead an hour-long drama that is luckily able to buck the procedural-cop-show quagmire that's overtaken CBS. It's also not a supernatural show like Medium. In fact, if Raines didn't make the point of dismissing the supernatural before the first commercial break, there would be absolutely nothing remarkable about the show. It'd be just another psychic detective show.

Raines' experience is the real hook to the show. He's not a grizzled veteran, but he's good enough at his job that what manifests as hallucination is merely his own crazy way of solving a case. As he says, probably much more eloquently and sarcastically than I'm transcribing here, there's no better way to solve a murder than to see it through the victim's eyes.

The supporting cast, including a very oddly serious Nicole Sullivan, complements Goldblum well, and tonight's pilot (beginning at 10 p.m. on NBC) shows a show with real promise. So, of course, it'll be canceled by April.