ANYBODY SEEN IT?:

The Inside Story: How Fox's newest series, "The Inside," found its way to television and reinvented the crime drama along the way. (Jonathan V. Last, 06/14/2005, Weekly Standard)

Minear's version of The Inside bears virtually no resemblance to the original. Gone are the drugs, the cliques, the parents, and the high school. Peter Facinelli, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Tom Cruise, has been replaced by the 62-year-old Peter Coyote. And instead of being a show about G-men chasing the bad guys, The Inside is now about the battle for a young woman's soul.

In the new pilot, which aired last week, we are introduced to an FBI Violent Crimes Unit, which operates out of the Bureau's Los Angeles field office. The unit is lead by Supervisory Special Agent Virgil Webster (Coyote), a man from whom menace is projected in waves. When a member of his team turns up dead, Webster replaces her the next morning with Agent Rebecca Locke (Nichols), who is fresh from a stint as an analyst at the Department of Homeland Security. Locke is bright and self-contained, but she has a secret: As a child, she was abducted and held hostage for 18 months until she escaped from her captors. Webster observed her from afar and, without her knowledge, personally saw to it that she was accepted to the FBI Academy, even though her psychiatric evaluations should have kept her out.

Agent Locke is the pretty face of The Inside,

but the show is really about Webster. His subordinates despise him and suspect that he may be up to no good. His number two, the upright Paul Ryan (Jay Harrington), bitterly says that the unit tackles only the cases which Webster picks, and that they pursue them only to his satisfaction. "Which may or may not be to completion," Ryan explains. "He gets bored sometimes."

The Inside has many virtues, not the least of which is an embarrassment of acting riches in the cast. In addition to Coyote's cool devilry, there's Adam Baldwin's congenital malice as Danny Love (watch Baldwin masticate his chewing gum as if William Wrigley Jr. had murdered his father) and Katie Finneran's pitch-perfect Melody Sim rounding out the squad. But the show's most important virtue is its sense of off-kilter mystery--just a few episodes in we can tell that not everything is quite right with The Inside.

There is the vaguest hint of the supernatural hanging about the show. Not quite Lost, not quite Twin Peaks, not quite The X-Files, there are, nonetheless, larger forces at work in Virgil Webster's office. Let's hope The Inside survives so that we can find out what they are.

The Inside isn't just great TV--it might even be good enough to save the procedural crime genre from its own success.