Alert: MPU Needs to Do More Than Kill off a Lead to Improve

In all honesty, I watched the first half of the first season of Alert: Missing Persons Unit before tapping out.

The only cast member with any gravitas was Scott Caan, and on his best days, Jason Grant is annoying as hell.

But then you add in all of the side characters, a miserably misleading story (yes, I’m talking about Keith), and enough production mistakes to drive anyone nuts, and well, you get the picture.

Yet, it remains on the schedule. Now in its third season, I heard the show took a big swing last night, and I decided to watch.

That didn’t paint a more rosy outlook than I had two seasons ago.

So, what drove this epiphany that the show is beyond saving? I’m glad you asked.

Alert: MPU Season 3 Episode 2 was titled “Badge #41870,” and it featured an actress standing in for co-lead Dania Ramirez as her character, Nikki Batista, got kidnapped by an old foe.

Honestly, the story doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Ramirez was already gone when this episode was filmed, and it’s the bigger mystery.

The dueling husbands aspect of Alert: MPU has always annoyed me, not only because love triangles of any kind are aggravating.

When you have the people supposedly most trusted to solve missing persons cases bickering over their love lives, it makes their ability to solve such cases even more unbelievable.

And in what world will the top three investigators of a missing persons unit be a husband and wife and her ex-husband? Not to mention the loony religious aspect of Kemi, which brings an entirely different vibe of incompetence to the show.

Separation of church and state would ensure that Kemi could practice whatever she wanted, but it would have to remain outside the workplace. Remember those incense-burning scenes from Alert: MPU Season 1 when she didn’t give a rat’s ass about her coworkers?

So, while Nikki is missing, the whole gang, including Malcolm Jamal Warner’s Chief Inspector Bill Houston (a role so far below his capabilities it makes me want to cry), set out to find Nikki.

But they are not feet to the ground, all hands on deck in any way I’ve ever experienced in another show when every second counts.

They’re leaning back in chairs, breathing comfortably, while using lines like, “I guess I’ve got a call to make,” and then ambling out of the room to do so. Uh, ya think? Ya think you have a call to make after discovering a clue that could lead to safely rescuing an important member of the unit? Awesome.

There was plenty of time for the current and ex-husbands to crack wise in a car (with the worst outside scenery boards I’ve seen in a long time).

When ex-husband Jason discovers Nikki’s body in the Canadian woods outside of Philadelphia, current husband Mike Sherman (Ryan Broussard) takes it upon himself to take out the bad guy, laws be damned.

Like all good procedural shows, Jason finds Mike poised and ready to shoot a bullet into said bad guy’s cranium, in the middle of the Canadian woods outside of Philadelphia, just in the nick of time.

Afterward, Jason reads the letter he found in the unreal lock box at a local postal store, which had all of the information Nikki had been gathering for years about the baddie. She knew her day was coming, but she seemingly didn’t trust the two men who loved her enough to share it with them. Awesome.

If you can’t trust the two men who have loved you for years, who can you trust? Well, the local Post-Is-Us store lockbox, of course.

And when all is said and done, and her letter chides the men to work together because their daughter will need it, Kemi blesses us with her spiel about her religion, and how they believe there is a place people go after life to … whatever. It’s heaven. That’s what it’s called. Heaven!

Can you tell that watching this show poked my buttons? See, I love FOX, and I want them to succeed, but some of the shows they let escape into the wild are beneath them.

Can they fix Alert: MPU? Maybe. But will it matter to an audience that has already tapped out? Probably not. It was a big swing to reset things, but seeing what’s left behind to work with, I don’t see how it will accomplish anything.

Photos from the upcoming episodes suggest it will be the Jason and Mike buddy cop version of Alert: MPU.

If I didn’t buy the triangle, I’d buy into this even less. I’m trying to imagine where it’s going. Perhaps another attempt at Lethal Weapon?

When you think of FOX, remember The X-Files and The Resident, and remember the short-lived Prodigal Son, which should have long outlasted this attempt at programming.

Turn on Doc for a good story and a competent love triangle. Please don’t think Alert: MPU is the best they have to offer.

Remember that Gordon Ramsay has chosen FOX as his US home.

Turn on the next episode of Next Level Chef (his best, if you ask me), and forget all about how Alert: MPU said goodbye to a series lead without the series lead.

It would be better for all of us if you did.