'Scorpion' and 'Forever': Crime dramas with a twist

Scorpion
CBS, Monday, 9 ET/PT
*** out of four

Forever
ABC, Monday 10 ET/PT; Then Tuesdays, 10 ET/PT
*** out of four

On TV, crime fighting is a recession-proof job market.

From superheroes to ordinary heroes, the industry is booming — and going to ever-greater and odder lengths to stand out in the market. In CBS's Scorpion, a group of outcast geniuses band together to stop high-tech criminals, as if the kids from The Big Bang Theory decided to become Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. In Forever, you get an immortal medical examiner who has had centuries to develop his deductive skills: Sherlock by way of New Amsterdam.

If you've forgotten New Amsterdam (and odds are you have), it was a 2008 Fox series that starred Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as a similarly immortal, murder-solving hero. Forever substitutes Ioan Gruffudd, in his best role since Horatio Hornblower, and a smarter, lighter approach to the subject.

Unlike other eternally-with-us heroes, Gruffudd's Dr. Henry Morgan can die, and does so often Monday and Tuesday, when the show moves to its regular time slot. His blessing or curse is that he always comes back to life again, naked and in the water. Only one person knows his secret: Sidekick Abe (Judd Hirsch). Most everyone else, like Detective Jo Martinez (Alana De La Garza), knows there's something off about Henry, but they can't quite figure out the cause.

Henry's ability to cheat death may be absurd, but the writers seem to have thought through the gimmick, from the reason why no one catches on (if they do, he moves) to the skills a long life has allowed him to develop. They need to put a bit more thought into the mysteries themselves, which lean toward the clunky. But the appeal of the stars and the premise should buy them some time. Not an eternity, though, so use it quickly and well.

Where Forever is clearly a fantasy, Scorpion is based on a real-life story,

of super-brain Walter O'Brien, played by Elyes Gabel. Walter has tried to create a fix-it business with a few fellow geniuses: a mechanical prodigy (Jadyn Wong), a world-class behaviorist (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and a math whiz (Ari Stidham) — but their inability to relate to normal people has left them underemployed.

Enter a government agent (Robert Patrick), who hires them, and a diner waitress (Katharine McPhee), who gets hired as their "normal world translator." As a newly formed "strategic response team," they race around Los Angeles to solve a software-created crisis, going through a series of increasingly desperate and mostly clever measures. They may be absurd, but they're enjoyable as long as you don't think about them too deeply. (Or, in the case of a final stunt with a car and an airplane, at all.)

Neither Scorpion nor Forever is doing much to advance the art of TV. But each counts as a well-produced, well-acted, light entertainment that generally avoids insulting your taste or your intelligence.

And for me, that's no crime.