Talkin' NBC's "Chase"

Kelli Giddish does her "Run, Lola, Run" impression in the terrifically terrible, cliche-ridden new NBC-TV drama about U.S. Marshals kung-fu fighting with super criminals while running in tight pants.

By DANIEL P. FINNEY
TV Talkin' Blog Staff Writer

Wow. This show is bad. This is eye-rolling bad.

"Chase" follows hard-faced U.S. Marshal Annie Frost (Kelli Giddish) as she and her appropriately diverse team (young guy fresh out of the academy, black woman, veteran guy who is happy to play second to the woman and a Latino guy) in chasing fugitives.

What it really is, though, is a dull collection of cop show cliches with choreographed fight scenes. 

Cliche 1: The lead character is a female fugitive hunter U.S. Marshal. Her motivation? Apparently her daddy was a fugitive and used her as a shield. Here's why people really become cops: 1. They had a cop in the family. 2. They were in the military. 3. They thought it was a cool job with decent pay. 4. They have a strong sense of justice and civic spirit. 5. They like to ride around in cars with lights and carry guns. Most of the cops I know fit in the first four slots. A few fit into the last spot. None of the cops I've ever met were the children of super criminals driven to right the wrongs of their family's past. Maybe that happened. Once.

Cliche 2: It takes cops forever to trace a phone call. It doesn't. Think about it. The GPS on your smart phone tells applications like Foursquare and various navigation programs where you are with in a few hundred feet. Do we really believe in 2010 that you have to keep a guy on the line for 5 minutes to trace their location? Use a land line, cops know where you are the moment you connect with dispatch. Use a cell phone, they know where you are with in a few feet of the local mobile phone tower.

Cliche 3: The bad guy kills seven or eight people in a span of a few days and isn't caught. Mass murderers are very rare. They don't happen that often. Except, apparently, every episode of a bad cop shows.

Cliche 4: Bad guys and cops fight like ninjas from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." This isn't how fights go. You fight a cop, maybe you get a swing in. Then they beat the crap out of you with a nightstick or ASP baton. There may be hair pulling. The groin could take a boot or two. I guarantee you no cop is slipping off their belt while doing a roundhouse kick and strangling a guy unconscious.

Cliche 5: Cops will jump 50 feet into the river to pursue a suspect when they could have just shot the guy -- a suspected murderer of at least three people when he was standing on the street right in front of them. Look, cops don't want to shoot people. They don't. But they will, especially a dangerous suspect who has already killed people. I'm not even going to get into how stupid it is to dive 50 feet or more off of a bridge into water. The fact that both the suspect and the cop in the episode didn't have multiple broken bones is beyond me.

Here's the real problem with this show: In an hour, they managed to do nothing that I haven't seen before nor did they create a single interesting character. Most of the time, I'll forgive unrealistic nonsense if the story is good. But this story is just boring. And bad.

"America's Most Wanted" gives a better picture of fugitive hunts than this. Watch back-to-back episodes of "Cops" on Fox. If you want real excitement, go for a ride-along with your local police. (Anybody can do it. Really.) Just don't watch "Chase." The only race this show is in is to see if it's the first of fall's offerings to end up canceled by Halloween.

Grade: F