The Timely Comforts of Case-Of-The-Week TV

In the extremely likely event that opening your phone, computer, or eyes to the world has become a source of dread lately, there’s no balm that soothes quite like turning on your television and turning off your brain. It’s how I recently got sucked into roughly 87,000 hours of Love Island USA — an alarming insight into my own mental health, but an addictively good time all the same. Or why I keep returning to The Great British Baking Show tent for a cuppa tea with the nicest reality show contestants in TV history. These kinds of shows give me a brief but beautiful time in which I can sit back, take a break from newsfeed horrors, and heckle a perfectly nice British nurse for screwing up her “illusion cake” tribute to her pet chicken.

If you’re also in the market for something that goes down smoother than cable news hosts screaming about the el*ction but want something more nutritious than Pastry Week can provide, the procedural is your surest path to relief. These shows — which introduce, investigate, and solve mysteries within an hour, tops — have been staples of television, from Columbo to Murder, She Wrote to the Dick Wolf Cinematic Universe, where Detective Olivia Benson has reigned supreme for a quarter-century and a 24/7 loop of the Chicago franchise (Med! Fire! P.D.! Justice!) could keep you busy till just about Thanksgiving. You could even argue that this category includes medical dramas like Grey’s Anatomy (for when you want a procedural by way of a romance novel) or ABC’s new Doctor Odyssey (for when you find yourself thinking, “What if Grey’s Anatomy, but on a boat?”), with their impossibly hot doctors, mystery ailments, and perfectly timed epiphanies around minute 36. These case-of-the-week shows are tried-and-true fixtures — and as some of 2024’s freshest additions prove, the classically comforting genre is thriving.

The most straight-forward of the new class is High Potential, ABC’s adaptation of a Belgian show in which a broke single mother uses her hyper intelligence to help the cops catch overlooked details. No, this is not 30 Rock’s Alexis Goodlooking, but good guess: Adding a brilliant, Sherlock-esque character to an otherwise basic team is a classic of the genre (see: Monk, House, Psych, etc.), and this version upgrades the premise by smartly casting Kaitlin Olson. Best known for sowing chaos as the craven Sweet Dee in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and finally Emmy-nominated for her turn as Jean Smart’s stunted daughter in Hacks (say it with me now: “What a c*nt!”), Olson is a TV pro who’s immediately at home in her character’s snakeskin boots. And while the show doles out intriguing character backstories to keep us hooked beyond the killer reveals, High Potential mostly keeps its crime-solving swift and simple.

If you’re in the mood for an even zanier heroine than Olson’s, Elsbeth is your girl. This CBS drama has serious procedural pedigree — it’s a spinoff of The Good Wife and The Good Fight, though you don’t need to have seen either to appreciate Carrie Preston’s deceptively astute lawyer as she stumbles into New York City’s most colorful crimes. The Season 2 premiere, for instance, stars Nathan Lane as an irritable opera lover driven to kill when a truly vile finance bro inherits the season-ticket seat in front of his own. (Honestly, who can blame him!) The suspense in Elsbeth isn’t in solving the culprit’s identity, as each episode opens with the crime itself, but how she’ll foil their getaway plans — an extra weighted-blanket of formulaic distraction that’s often just as silly as it is smart.

Still, maybe the best example of how TV is rethinking procedurals is the new version of Matlock, starring the one and only Kathy Bates. What at first looks like a basic reboot of the legendary Andy Griffith legal drama reveals itself to be something else entirely. Bates’ character isn’t a gender-flipped Matlock, but (spoiler alert) a grieving mother going undercover at the corporate law firm she believes is ultimately responsible for covering up the opioid industry’s worst secrets. With Jane the Virgin creator Jennie Snyder Urman at the helm, the show keeps its characters grounded while bouncing with banter and reeling from sly twists. So while this Matlock does typical weekly mysteries well, it keeps a canny eye out for what it can do differently, too.

When real-life headlines start to feel like too much, ripped-from-the-headlines TV can offer a strange comfort: a fantasy realm of easily cracked cases, flirty intrigue, and unfailingly helpful law enforcement. The beats are so well-worn we can recite them from memory — the opening crime, the red herring suspects, the famous guest star of the week — but in a world that can feel so confusing and out of bounds, these predictable pleasures provide guard rails, and as long as exhausted viewers need relief, they’ll never go out of style. I love when a sprawling epic or a shocking cliffhanger gets me on the edge of my seat. But as much as we can appreciate shows that make us think, sometimes all we really want is to not think about anything at all.