Item, ‘The Evidence’ just doesn’t add up

The twist in “The Evidence,” a crime drama premiering tonight at 10 on ABC, is that viewers get all the physical evidence of a crime before the inspectors do, then watch as the hyper-stylized, hyper-foreshadowed close-ups of the puzzle pieces fit into place.

It isn’t a bad gimmick, establishing a certain tension, but the premise is about the only thing that recommends “The Evidence,” a show that otherwise seems to be moving you -- rather than moving -- through its procedural paces.

“Item, cellular phone displaying last number dialed.... Item, large flowering hydrangea, with balloons.... Item, human finger, severed, with attached compass ring.”

It’s the voice of Martin Landau, who plays Dr. Sol Goldman, head of the San Francisco Police Department forensics lab. Each episode is, evidently, meant to start this way, with a slow Landau recitation, but he’s just a supporting player in a lab coat and a kind of stock character at that.

The stars of “The Evidence,” which ABC has put in the time slot occupied this season by the sci-fi series “Invasion,” are Orlando Jones as Det. Cayman Bishop and Rob Estes as Inspector Sean Cole.

It isn’t a dynamic pairing (if you’re having a where-have-I-seen-him moment with Estes, he was on “Melrose Place” and before that a syndicated cop show called “Silk Stalkings”).

The show brings them on-stage dressed GQ style, golfing in a salvage yard, the Golden Gate Bridge in the misty background.

It’s your typical Hollywood sense of San Francisco (though the show was shot mostly in Vancouver), its own kind of foreshadowing. Throughout the episode, witty buddy-cop movie banter is meant to suggest chemistry where little exists (sample: Cole: “Let’s bounce.” Bishop: “Uh, Central, we have an unlicensed white male using black vernacular, all units, please”).

The pilot tells us -- and I mean tells us -- that Cole is still trying to get beyond the unsolved murder of his wife, a trauma that dovetails with tonight’s case in which a young medical student is found with her throat slashed. As you wonder whose hand is still attached to the soon-to-be-severed finger with the compass ring, the boys visit a maker of private erotic movies and a psych ward, not to mention the hospital pharmacy where the victim worked, which looks like a tricked-out bar in a Vegas nightclub.

Created by Sam Baum and Dustin Thomason under the imprimatur of John Wells Productions, “The Evidence” tries to end its initial hour with an emotional home run, using the song “Breathe Me” by Sia, the haunting piece used so effectively to close the curtain on HBO’s “Six Feet Under.”

But it feels more like a shortcut around the bases, a variation on that Fred Allen line that “imitation is the sincerest form of television.”

*

‘The Evidence’

Where: ABC

When: 10 to 11 tonight

Ratings: TV-14 L,V (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14 with advisories for coarse language and violence)