TV Reviews : Cop Casts a Net for Her Rapist in ‘Settle the Score’

If you bought Jaclyn Smith as an undercover investigator, Florence Nightingale, Jackie Kennedy and Martha Washington, you’ll buy her as a frigid Arkansas farm girl who becomes a Chicago cop.

In “Settle the Score” (airing at 9 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39), she goes back to her Ozark home to find the man who raped her 20 years earlier.

Executive producer-writer Steve Sohmer has an interesting little mystery for a while. In Chicago, cop Kate (Smith) kills a robber-rapist, likes it and is promptly put on sick leave. When she learns that 15 years ago a girl in her old vicinity was raped and murdered in the same way that she was raped and left to die, she heads back. She learns of another victim, then another.

Kate is greeted by her family with great disinterest. She never fit in and don’t fit in no more no how. When Pa grumbles at her, Ma avers, “Don’t never pay him no mind,” invoking the triple negative that, according to Sohmer, is the way the hill folks done talk.

But it’s no never mind, since great maws open up in the plot and all sense falls in and away.

Smith acts with frowns and rolling lips, signifying various emotions. But it’s no never mind, since she is one of those special phenomena of television that we keep going back to because they’re great to look at, like Hawaii.