This is the dreaded question. And I know I’ve been surprisingly mum on the subject. But I just keep having these scattered, upsetting thoughts. Like, if I say that I don’t like Rizzoli & Isles, will they just think I’m being loyal to Women’s Murder Club? If I say that I do like Rizzoli & Isles, will they think that I’m a turncoat? And so then I thought that maybe it was best to just not say anything at all. But, then I realized that, although they may ask in passing, no one really cares that much about my opinion anyway.

And that is phenomenally freeing.

So, first off, before we even get to the pilot episode of Rizzoli & Isles, let’s talk promotion. More specifically, let’s talk the interviews that Angie Harmon has been doing for Rizzoli & Isles.

For instance, let’s take this section out of the interview on NoControl.

“…Were you worried at all about the comparisons to Women’s Murder Club?

This is the perfected version of that. I mean, it really is. Am I not supposed to say that? I don’t know, but it is! I feel like Women’s Murder Club was sort of a dress rehearsal for this.”

“Am I not supposed to say that?” No, Angie, you’re not.

Perfected version of Women’s Murder Club? Really? But we’ll get back to that.

And then there was this rambling interview with Small Screen Scoop where I couldn’t tell if Angie was really just that distracted or if she had just been sniffing aerosol. Because she repeats the same things over and over… and over… and she doesn’t have the excuse of being 90 years old like my Aunt Mary.

There are several bizarre things in this interview, but what gets me the most is the number of times she refers to the caliber *insert gun cocking here* of the Rizzoli & Isles cast. Which would be very fine and well… kind even… if it didn’t sound so damn much like she was dissing the entire Women’s Murder Club cast. And, while yes, there is something to be said for scoring Lorraine Bracco, Chazz Palminteri and Brian Dennehy, the name-dropping should really have ceased there. Because pretending that the rest of the Rizzoli & Isles cast is filled out with incredible thespians, with the not-too-hidden implication that these thespians outact those she worked with on Women’s Murder Club, is simply, well, delusional.

So maybe she really was huffing.

The last question, where she responds to which mystery fiction writers she reads with the fact that Alien and Aliens are two of her top five favorite movies and then segues through an unusual progression to the fact that she’s an adrenaline junkie does lend credence to this theory. It also poses more questions, like where do Alien and Aliens fall on the list? And what are the other three movies in the top five?

Oh, and if anyone can figure out who plays Rizzoli’s dad from this interview, please let me know. I don’t think she mentioned it… three times.

So, let’s just say that Rizzoli & Isles and I were not starting out on the best foot when I watched it on Monday night.

Then, they took a shot at the bad foot.

I am not a prude. In general, I am not a fan of censorship. And yet… I found the opening scene of Rizzoli & Isles disturbing. I write scenes that are far more graphic. But I don’t put them on cable television at 10 pm. If I had accidentally watched this scene at 12 or 13 years old, I would have been disturbed by it for weeks… and that is not an exaggeration. My dad took me to see the movie Cliffhanger right around that age, and there is a scene at the beginning where a woman’s harness breaks when she is zipping between two mountain ranges and Sylvester Stallone is trying to rescue her and she keeps begging him not to drop her for like a minute and a half and then he drops her. Very traumatic. Anyway, when I was thinking today about what the first scene of R&I was reminiscent of for me, I realized that it was a similar scene in A Clockwork Orange. And nothing on TNT at 10 pm should draw A Clockwork Orange to mind.

As for the rest of Rizzoli & Isles, I actually found it rather old hat. I didn’t find any of the characters particularly unique or interesting, though they tried hard to make the characters seem more unique and interesting than they were. And they’ve already made Rizzoli an idiot detective. Because only an idiot detective would crawl into the back of a van when she knows someone is trying to kill her. Don’t worry though, because her ex-partner was an idiot detective too. How they both managed to stay alive for the pilot is the biggest mystery of the whole episode.

They used two (TWO!) animal plot devices (unless you count the giving of the little turtle to Rizzoli a plot device in itself, and, in that case, there were three), one of which was lifted straight out of the Women’s Murder Club pilot. And it was NOTICEABLE.

Oh, and the word “tits” makes me throw up in my mouth a little every time I hear it. It didn’t sound any better in Angie’s voice.

That said, there really was something worth watching in the first episode. In her two brief scenes, Lorraine Bracco was phenomenal.