Look at almost anybody's list of TV's best and most durable recent dramas and, a large percentage of them, from "The Wire" to "Breaking Bad, are likely to be crime dramas. That means different things on different shows: "The Killing" plays by the rules of a procedural whodunit, while "Breaking Bad" follows the trajectory of classic noir as defined, if memory serves, by novelist Megan Abbott: "Starts bad, gets worse." As ace crime novelist turned writer-producer on "The Wire," scriptwriter George Pelecanos told IW's Alison Willmore: "Crime stories are a narrative engine. You grab the viewer with a mystery to be solved, but that's not why the viewer stays with you." "The Killing," which wrapped up its excellent third season on Sunday, seemed to offend some commentators by adhering at the end a little too closely to the conventions of generic crime fiction, with an artfully contrived least-likely-suspect reveal. It's always a tightrope act in this genre, deciding how many...
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