Special effects and blood 'n' guts will always attract an audience, but nothing excites one like a great story. NBC's new drama Boomtown doesn't have one great story, it weaves many great stories into one fantastic show. Part Memento, part Pulp Fiction, Boomtown is a novel and risky type of cop drama that delves into the underworld of Los Angeles, a.k.a Boomtown.
Each episode revolves around one crime, seen from many viewpoints. The crime is broken down from the perspective of two detectives, two policemen, the district attorney, a hard-hitting reporter, and a compassionate paramedic. Each take their own path to the truth, and the paths come together to a stunning climax to reveal the answers to the many mysteries of the crime.
The producers and writers of Boomtown are masterful in developing the show's characters, while still sticking to the unique format. Former New Kid on the Block, Donnie Wahlberg, surprisingly shines as Detective Joel Stevens; who embraces his role as a determined officer and husband.
He must balance his dynamic professional life with his rocky personal life (his wife is suicidal), and Wahlberg captures the nuances perfectly. The magic of Boomtown is partially due to the way the personal lives of the characters are developed, something missing from other cop shows like any of the incarnations of Law & Order.
Other fantastic performances come from Forrest Gump's Mykelti Williamson as Wahlberg's partner, "Fearless" Bobby Smith, a Gulf War vet who lives up to his nickname. In addition, Neil McDonough captures the politically ambitious and morally lacking D.A. David McNorris. McNorris is caught in an affair with equally ambitious street reporter Andrea Little (Nina Garbiras), and the relationship between the two becomes more and more complex as the show progresses.
Boomtown succeeds in ways that many other clich?©d cops and robbers shows fail. It moves to the beat of a human heart, and touches on the lives of the victims and those affected by the death of the victims. Dick Wolf, producer of Law & Order, prides his show on being "strictly the facts" and viewers can count on a specific formula for every episode. Boomtown, on the other hand, searches the human soul, and finds why a 16 year old will commit a seemingly senseless drive-by murder, as it did in the pilot.
Ingenuity alone cannot make a television program fantastic. Like last year's innovative darling 24, Boomtown has extraordinary writing to drive its convoluted plot. Writer/Executive Producer Graham Yost (Band of Brothers) said the following about Boomtown, "Sometimes the best way to tell the whole story about something is not to try to tell the whole story, but to tell all the little stories and let the viewers put it together themselves." It is these little stories that make Boomtown such an exhilarating thrill ride through the world of Los Angeles crime.
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