Previewing TNT’s Mystery Movie Night

TNT’s Mystery Movie Night is for a certain type of person (full disclosure notice: I am not one of them) and that is for anyone who watches CBS more than any other channel. The kind of people who see Marcia Gay Harden or Alfred Molina and are instantly intrigued. The kind of people that already have a couple novels by Scott Turow already on their bookshelves. The kind of people who are, dare I say considering TNT recently canceled a similarly named show, men of a certain age.

Scott Turow’s Innocent is the basis of the first Mystery Movie Night airing tonight at 9:00. The movie follows a judge (Bill Pullman, While You Were Sleeping) whose wife (Marcia Gay Harden, The Mist), has just died under suspicious circumstances (aren’t all deaths in mystery books?) and the prosecutor (Richard Schiff, The West Wing) who was unable to pin the death of the judge’s mistress on him twenty years ago is trying to build another case to bring down him down. It does not help that the judge’s current mistress his former clerk and current girlfriend to his son. There are plenty of twist and turns you expect from a mystery movie and a ending you will not see coming (assuming you have not already read the book). But that is mostly because it may be the most boring outcome that could have been written.



The Mystery Movie Night returns tomorrow, also at 9:00, with Ricochet based on the book by Sandra Brown and feature actors that are a bit more endearing to men of my certain age: Rita Morgan! Bill Lumbergh!! Dwayne Motherfracking Wayne!!! Much like Innocent, Ricochet features a judge (Lumbergh) but this time around it is his wife that may have caught the infidelity bug and the detective (John Corbett, Parenthood) looking into her self defense murder of a home invader wants a piece of the action. It does not help that Lumbergh recently threw Corbett in jail for contempt after one of his cases got thrown out on a technicality. It should be noted that the Ricochet script was written by the same guy who wrote The Craigslist Killer as these early Mystery Movie Night films have a slightly classier vibe than your regular Lifetime Movies.

The Mystery Movie Night continues through December. Next Tuesday, Carla Gugino and Mark-Paul Gosselaar team up for Hide originally written in book form by Lisa Gardner. Wednesday is the premiere of Richard North Patterson’s Silent Witness starring Dermot Mulroney, Anne Heche, and Judd Hirsh. Then on Tuesday December 13 April Smith’s Good Morning, Killer gets the movie treatment starring Catherine Bell, Cole Hauser, William Devane, and Titus Welliver. And just in time for Christmas, the mother / daughter writing team of Mary and Carol Higgins Clark and their book Deck the Halls gets turned into a movie Tuesday December 20 starring Kathy Najimy, Scottie Thompson, and Larry Miller. And if you enjoy the Mystery Movie Night, you are in luck because yesterday TNT already ordered up a new movie based on Patricia Cornwell’s Hornet’s Nest and have already cast Sherry Stringfield, Virginia Madsen, and Michael Boatman and is set to air sometime in 2012.