Summary
Murder in a Small Town continues to have more interesting characters that it does crimes, but “Fall From Grace” feels like a step down from the premiere by foregrounding the latter.
Murders in picturesque local towns are like buses. You wait ages for one, and then several come along at once. That’s how it must feel for Cassandra in Murder in a Small Town Episode 2, anyway. There she is trying to get her new relationship with the local police chief on track, and he keeps being dragged away to solve crimes.
Since work already got in the way of things in the premiere, it’s hard to imagine this fledgling romance lasting the season. The ball always seems to be in Karl’s court, too. Does he stop doing his job? Leave crimes unsolved? Or just sit around and hope that Gibson returns to some kind of status quo? At the current crime rate that doesn’t seem especially likely. We’ve got a procedural to enjoy, after all.
I wasn’t wildly keen on the case of the week in “Fall From Grace”. There’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s little to get excited about. A drug-related murder could happen anywhere, and it makes one wonder what the point of this charming little setting is if it has the same bustling underground narcotics economy as any other city.
Didn’t care about the suspects either, truthfully. The murder in the premiere was engaging because despite the culprit being obvious it raised some interesting questions; it challenged Karl’s ideas of justice and felt intimately connected to Gibson. It’s a local who gets smacked over the head with a concrete rebar in this episode, to be fair, but it doesn’t have the same feel.
In the absence of any wider ideas Murder in a Small Town is just another procedural, and Episode 2 feels less specific than the opener did, less rife with potential. That’s true of the actual murder plot, anyway. The character work remains strong, though I worry that we might circle the same drain for too long before we get anywhere.
Murder in a Small Town | Image via Fox
Case in point: In “Fall From Grace”, Cassandra wants to attend a prom-themed high-school reunion with Karl, partly to relive her youth, but also to go public with their relationship. He’s not the party type, and he keeps being pulled away by work, but he makes an effort to be with her in an unlikely romantic setting for an adult couple – a high-school gymnasium.
This stuff largely works fine. I like the juxtaposition of an adult relationship and a quintessential teen-drama fixture. It somehow doesn’t feel as silly as you’d think, probably because the core of the relationship is quite mature. These are two people who know they’re past their primes and aren’t trying to relive them, but are negotiating through their futures against the backdrop of a long-gone youth. The quasi-prom setting is ironically a reminder of their adulthood.
The problem I foresee is that this pattern of behavior – Karl and Cassandra commit, they try to do normal couple stuff, and Karl is reliably pulled away by his responsibilities to Gibson – might repeat enough times to become dull. What I’d like to see from Murder in a Small Town is, oddly, less murder. Some more characterful plots that feel specific to the place and personal to the characters would better serve the central relationship, and it’d help the show’s two obvious halves to feel more of a cohesive whole.
Still, you should criticize something based on what it is, not what you’d like it to be, and “Fall From Grace” is a perfectly functional and respectable episode of a network procedural. But if it wants to really stand out, it’s going to have to become something more than that sooner rather than later.
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