Life

Charlie and Dani make an odd pair. She's angry with the world -- as well as with her partner -- and eager to vent her feelings on any suspects who need to be questioned, a tactic that makes for interrogation scenes that could have appeared in dozens of other cop shows. But Charlie is focused on enjoying the moment, every moment, which helps him gain witnesses' trust and glean suspects' motives. His quirky mannerisms are certainly a gimmick and, while amusing, Charlie isn't a believable character. He irritates his colleagues on the force, and his repeated efforts to stay focused on the moment can get tiresome for viewers.

Life is actually trying to meld several major threads. First, there's Charlie the Zen-cop, who's learning to live on the outside. His sudden fame -- and the massive financial settlement he received -- have made him very popular with women, who stream in and out of his bedroom anonymously. Meanwhile, Charlie is secretly trying to find out who framed him more than a decade earlier, a task that will clearly take a whole lot of episodes to come to fruition. And, finally, there are the individual murder mysteries, which must be neatly tied up by the end of each hour. But one of the problems with Life is that the show spends so much time focusing on the other aspects of the show that there's little left over for the stand-alone cases, which often seem simple and underdeveloped.