Some keep their cards firmly pressed to their chests. They choose their battles. They understand the difference between winning the war and keeping the peace, between crouching tigers and hidden dragons. They're wily strategists. What they know has come from decades of experience, not from reading a manual or brashly jumping to conclusions. The skeletons are carefully concealed in their desks. By contrast, others wear their hearts, as well as their anger and their pride, on their sleeves. They strong-arm those that block them, unaware that bullying and bluster give away too much and paradoxically make them vulnerable. Their victories are usually hollow. Welcome to the men and women of Seven's new crime series City Homicide. In the former corner of the homicide squad are salty Detective Senior Sergeant Stanley Wolfe (Shane Bourne) and Detective Superintendent Bernice Waverley (Noni Hazlehurst). In the latter, the aggressive alpha-male Duncan Freeman (Aaron Pedersen) and his cocky, too-handsome constable colleague Simon Joyner (Daniel MacPherson); somewhere in-between, still trying to figure out where they belong, is the enigmatic Matt Ryan (Damien Richardson) and soon-to-be-promoted Jennifer Mapplethorpe (Nadine Garner), the female part of the “four musketeers†as the junior members of the unit are known. Created and written by John Hugginson and John Banas, whose credits include prime-time staples Blue Heelers and Water Rats, City Homicide makes a promising debut tonight by not straying too far from the established norms of the genre. There is a plucked-from-the-headlines story of urban crime and its detection - in this case a discomforting story that evolves around jilted men avenging their wives' infidelity - told from the multiple perspectives of the victims and the law, whose modus operandi here consists of old-school detective work; interviews with suspects, footwork, intuition and bravery (without a single lab-coat or high-tech computer read-out in sight). There's the stable of regular characters that straddle generational and ethnic divides and who the audience isn't asked to immediately fall in love with or detest but merely to empathise with. It's well enough cast for the characters on screen to seem credible and the 90-minute episode that introduces the principal characters and the broader conflicts moves at a steady gallop. Which is not to say City Homicide isn't without its weaknesses. Some scenes fall flat on their faces - a confrontation in a hotel kitchen that should sizzle just fizzles, for example, while some of the main plot turns strain with contrivance.
