2015-2016, 18 episodes. Detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura
Isles continue in their odd-couple crimefighting.
This is mostly pretty generic television that does exactly what
it says on the tin, but then manages to be just a little bit better.
So, yeah, it's a cop show, where the police are Good, and protections
for the innocent exist solely to get in their way as they catch Bad
Guys. But it keeps an effective balance between being a two-hander
and having a full ensemble cast; it admits that there are dirty cops
as well as plain old drug-dealers and murderers and so on; it has a
cast who have mostly been there from day one, who are clearly
comfortable working with each other, and scriptwriters who aren't
afraid to have lighter and even soap-operatic moments among all the
grimdark serial-killer stuff.
Since one of the show's regular supporting actors killed himself after
the end of season 4, the other cast members seem to have worked out an
even better chemistry with each other than they'd established up to
that point, and it wasn't bad before.
There is a certain amount of the CSI flavour in that people who do
Weird Things are probably going to be murderers or victims, but at
least women on this show are allowed not to be strictly monogamous
without this being shown to destroy their lives every single time.
Direction is mostly workmanlike, though there's some excellent use of
a lovely abandoned building in the first episode after the mid-season
break. There's also some very heavy-handed foreshadowing in the final
episode, when Korsak's long-delayed wedding is intercut with the
season's Big Bad setting up an ambush, complete with fade to black and
the sound of a gunshot to close the episode. Ah well, nobody takes
this sort of thing seriously any more.
The series was renewed for a 13-episode final season.
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