‘Justice’ serves too many things we’ve seen before

Allow me to start by calling for a moratorium on serial killers on screens big and small, and also on the use of naked corpses of good-looking young women (discovered typically in weedy fields or abandoned warehouses) for cheap titillating effect. We’ve had enough of them to last until midcentury. Tonight’s premiere episode of “Blind Justice” (ABC) offers both. Given that the producer is Steven Bochco, whose great delight it has been to increase the square footage of flesh showable on broadcast prime-time television, you can imagine that there’s more body on display here than usual. Who will join me? We can make bumper stickers and refrigerator magnets.

“Blind Justice” concerns Jim Dunbar (Ron Eldard), an NYPD police detective who is, yes he is, blind. In spite of the sadly obvious title and a smattering of ailments so common to the genre and to the medium that we may factor them out, it’s a decent enough show, well acted and nice to look at. If a little overfull of happy coincidence, stock characters and situational cliche, it also has an admirable stillness of tone, even when ratcheting up the suspense (which, on the basis of three episodes available for review, it could stand to do a little more often), and except in the accepted ways, it does not insult your intelligence.

A year or so after having heroically lost his sight in the firefight that opens tonight’s episode, Dunbar returns to the force; he has had to sue the department to get his job back. When he arrives at his new post, with his handsome guide dog Hank, he is not greeted, as one might imagine, with friendly interest or professional solidarity but as if he were moldy cheese. None of his fellow officers want him as a partner, for fear he’ll slow them down or get them killed. They are petulant and suspicious, in an adolescent manner.

They’d be less so, perhaps, if they understood that Dunbar is merely the latest iteration of a long line of blind detectives, all of them exceedingly capable. The idea isn’t even new to television, fans of the 1971 series “Longstreet” will even now be raising their hands to point out. It runs back deep into the last century, to such sightless sleuths as Clinton H. Stagg’s Thornley Colton; Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, who could read newspaper headlines with a touch of his fingers; and to Baynard Kendrick’s Duncan Maclain, played by Edward Arnold in a couple of 1940s B-films. More recent precursors include the blind samurai Zatoichi, subject of more than two dozen Japanese films, and the inspiration for the Rutger Hauer movie “Blind Fury.” There is also Britain’s “Second Sight,” which appeared here on PBS’ “Mystery!,” with Clive Owen going blind from a rare virus. Even Dick Tracy lost his sight for a spell, back in 1938-39. And there’s Daredevil, of course, though he has the advantage of actual superpowers, having lost his sight in a rain of radioactive gunk.

But even the ordinary fictional blind detective has recourse to uncannily heightened senses of smell, touch, hearing and, I suppose, taste, though that has not come into play yet. Dunbar sniffs the faintest trace of cordite in a stolen car and knows a gun was fired there; the bad cologne of a fellow cop identifies him as complicit to a murder; the sound of swarming flies tips him to a buried corpse. We’re meant to regard him as just an ordinary guy with better than average reflexes, but also, in the way of TV detectives, as a superman.The atmosphere is one of limited realism -- a sprinkling of grit, an outpouring of emotion -- without being actually naturalistic. It was Bochco’s big idea, after all, going back to “Hill Street Blues,” to graft a rarefied form of soap opera onto a police procedural; this combination pulls his shows inevitably toward melodrama. “Blind Justice” has the feel of something made by people who know their job too well, have become incapable of the sort of “mistakes” that let life in. The dialogue sounds like dialogue, the dynamics of Dunbar’s fraught home life and fraught workplace seem to have been ordered from a catalog. Even Dunbar’s “human qualities” -- his bottled-up temper, his defensiveness, his self-centeredness, his paranoia, his alternating coldness to and jealousness toward his very nice wife (Rena Sofer) -- seem, so far, grafted on.

The series’ primary asset, for now, is Eldard’s wary chemistry with partner Marisol Nichols, who despite being too young for her job makes herself seem qualified for it. A fine, modest actor -- in terms of his chosen effects, not of his talent -- Eldard is perhaps best known from an extended tour of duty on “ER,” but my own viewing memory associates him with a superior 1998 TV movie called “When Trumpets Fade,” about the battle of the Hurtgen Forest. He is worth watching anytime. And there is the well-photographed, colorful City of New York, which is intelligently allowed to stand for itself.

*

‘Blind Justice’

Where: ABC

When: 10 p.m.

Rating: TV-14 V (strong advisory for violence and partial nudity)

Ron Eldard...Det. Jim Dunbar

Marisol Nichols...Det. Karen

Bettancourt

Rena Sofer...Christie Dunbar

Reno Wilson...Det. Tom Selway

Frank Grillo...Det. Marty Russo

Michael Gaston...Lt. Fisk

Executive producers Bill Clark and John Badham. Creators Steven Bochco, Nicholas Wootton, Matt Olmstead. Teleplay Nicholas Wootton and Matt Olmstead.