All TV: 'Women's Murder Club' adds to TV's body count

Today's column reviews ABC's lame "Women's Murder Club":

So I was watching Wednesday night's episode of NBC's "Life," and when the cops used a bunch of shady-looking Latinos to threaten a murder suspect into confessing, I said, "Now where did I just see that?" I searched what's left of my short-term memory at this stage of the fall season and realized it was in something that hadn't aired yet: an upcoming episode of ABC's "Women's Murder Club," which debuts tonight at 9.

We are in the middle of a major procedural crime glut. There are now more than a dozen network shows with some kind of significant crime-solving element (even more if you start working in fantasy shows that have weekly mysteries, like "Pushing Daisies" and "Reaper"), not to mention all the rotating cop and detective shows on USA, TNT, FX and elsewhere in the cable universe.

There are too many cops, too many killers, too many mysteries that play out exactly the same from show to show. The sheer tonnage of this stuff has, ironically, made the crime-solving part almost irrelevant. The shows that succeed are the ones where the characters are compelling enough that you'll keep watching even after figuring out whodunit by the second commercial break.

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