Cold Case

Cold Case
Cold Case Logo
Format	Police procedural
Created by	Meredith Stiehm
Starring	Kathryn Morris Danny Pino Justin Chambers John Finn Jeremy Ratchford Thom Barry Tracie Thoms
Theme music composer	Helmut and Franz Vonlichten
Opening theme	Nara
Slogan	Time never runs out for justice.
Country of origin	United States
No. of seasons	5
No. of episodes	111 (List of episodes)
Production
Location(s)	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Running time	approx. 45 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	CBS
Picture format	480i (SDTV), 1080i (HDTV)
Original run	September 28, 2003 – present
External links
Official website
IMDb profile
TV.com summary

Philadelphia Portal

Cold Case is an American police procedural television series revolving around a fictionalized Philadelphia Police Department division that specializes in investigating cold cases. The series first aired in September 2003 on CBS. Its fifth season began on September 23, 2007.

Due to the end of the writers strike, the show returned March 30, 2008 with 5 new episodes.^[1]

On May 14, 2008, Cold Case has been renewed for a sixth season.

Format

Each episode of Cold Case begins with a flashback scene informing viewers of the year in which it takes place. A set of characters are revealed in a seemingly mundane situation. The viewer is then shown the corpse of the victim as he or she was found. It is usually one of the people introduced in the previous, seemingly innocent scene.

The show then flashes to the present day. The detectives of the homicide division of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, police department are told there is reason for further investigation of an old case gone cold, for one of several reasons: new evidence has come to light, the victim's physical remains have been discovered, a witness has decided to come forward, etc. All or any of these reasons cause the detectives to give the cold case a new look and begin researching the victim and interviewing their friends, acquaintances, and family.

The friends, family, co-workers, etc. who were introduced in the flashback at the beginning of the episode have aged (in one case, a seven-year-old witness to the crime is interviewed by the detectives when she is 95). Gradually, the detectives gather enough evidence to determine the killer, who most of the time, is then arrested.

At the end of each episode, the detectives mark the case solved, putting the evidence box back on the shelf, while an apparition of the murdered person(s) looks on.

The problems in the detectives' personal lives are also featured, though the main emphasis of every story is on the victim and the search for the killer. Most notably, Detective Lilly Rush grew up in a severely dysfunctional, poverty-stricken home with an alcoholic mother.

The show usually casts a young actor for the flashback sequences and an older actor for the shots in the present, and cut back and forth between the two, to show how the character has aged.

Each episode, during the flashbacks, features a different style of direction, whether it be the colors, lighting, shading, or camera angles. Flashbacks often match a style from that era, such as a black-and-white flashback depicting the 1950s.

Victims and end scenes

Typically, once the murderer is revealed, their confession is depicted in one final flashback in which the murder is shown. The episode then usually ends with a montage (with no dialogue) of the killer(s) being arrested, set to a song of the era, as well as the fates of other characters from that era, showing all of them in their current appearance, but briefly flashing back to their younger selves. Finally, Detective Lilly Rush or someone else close to the victim seeing a vision of the grateful-looking victim standing nearby, who then quickly vanishes (this aspect of the show is left up to personal interpretation: depending on the viewer's perspective, it could be Rush's imagination, or it could be representative of the victims themselves). There have been numerous variations on this pattern, however.

Music

The show's theme song is an excerpt from "Nara" by E.S. Posthumus (who also performs the theme for the NFL on CBS), with an introduction by series composer Michael A. Levine. Besides Levine's original music, each episode makes extensive use of era-appropriate music for flashbacks to the year in question.

Characters

From left to right: Det. Nick Vera, Lt. John Stillman, Det. Will Jeffries, Det. Lilly Rush and Det. Scotty Valens

Main article: List of Cold Case characters

• Det. Lilly Rush played by Kathryn Morris
• Det. Scotty Valens played by Danny Pino (From episode 6 of season 1)
• Lt. John Stillman played by John Finn
• Det. Will Jeffries played by Thom Barry
• Det. Nick Vera played by Jeremy Ratchford
• Det. Kat Miller played by Tracie Thoms (Season 3-)
• Det. Chris Lassing played by Justin Chambers (Episodes 1,2 and 4 of Season 1)
• Det. Josie Sutton played by Sarah Brown (Episodes 1-5 of Season 3)

CSI: NY crossover

On May 2, 2007, one of the Cold Case detectives made a rare appearance outside of the series. In the CSI: NY episode "Cold Reveal", Danny Pino appeared as his Cold Case character Scotty Valens as he traveled to New York when it was discovered that CSI Stella Bonasera (Melina Kanakaredes) was connected to an unsolved case. Some of the CSI shows have crossed over with each other at some point (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and CSI: Miami, CSI: Miami and CSI: NY), but this is the first time that any one of the three shows has interacted with a character from Cold Case and acknowledged that they all exist in the same world. The CSI shows and Cold Case all air on CBS and are produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

Similar series

The investigation of "cold cases" has been used as the basis for several other detective dramas, including:

• The Enigma Files, UK / BBC, 1980
• Cold Squad, CAN / CTV, 1998
• Waking the Dead, UK / BBC, 2000
• New Tricks, UK / BBC, 2003

Cold Squad controversy

Upon its launch, television critics noted similarities between Cold Case and a similar Canadian series called Cold Squad which debuted in 1998, several years before Cold Case^[2]. Fans of Cold Squad accused the American series of copying the basic premise and characters of the Canadian version. In 2003, the creators of Cold Squad considered launching legal action against the makers of Cold Case over copyright issues.^[3][4] Both shows air in Canada (and on the same network, CTV).

Coincidentally, Alliance Atlantis, which owns the DVD rights to Cold Squad, also co-produces the CSI franchise, another creation of Bruckheimer.

Real life cases

A 2004 episode based on the "Boy in the Box",^[5], a still-unsolved 1957 Philadelphia homicide, was criticized for giving viewers the false impression that the actual case had been solved.

This was not the only episode to use real events as inspiration. Some other episodes include:

• The pilot episode "Look Again" was based on the Martha Moxley murder case in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1975.
• The 1st season episode "Our Boy Is Back" (aka "Useless Cats") was based on the actual case of Troy Graves - the infamous Center City Rapist - who raped a total of 12 women between 1997 and 2001, one of whom was murdered. The victim was based on the real-life murder victim Shannon Scheiber.
• The 1st season episode "Love Conquers Al" was based on the 1995 murder of Adrianne Jones at the hands of Texas Navy cadets Diane Zamora and David Graham.
• The 1st season episode "Disco Inferno" was based on the Station nightclub fire and the Happy Land fire.
• The 1st season episode "Late Returns" was loosely based on the 2001 Chandra Levy murder case.
• The 1st season episode "Maternal Instincts" was based on the real-life cold case of Cathleen Krauseneck.
• The 1st season finale "Lover's Lane" was loosely based on the tragic murder of 9-year-old Krystal Dawn Steadman in 1999.^[6]. The location of the crime may have been based on the attack Bryan Calvin Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Ann Shepard, 22 in 1969. They were victims of the Zodiac Killer.
• The 2nd season episode "The House" is based on Glen Stewart Godwin who escaped from Folsom Prison.
• The 2nd season episodes "Mind Hunters" and "The Woods" were based on the serial killer case of Robert Hansen, who kidnapped and killed 15 women between 1980 and 1983.
• The 2nd season episode "Schadenfreude" was based on the Sam Sheppard case.
• The 2nd season episode "Strange Fruit" featured shades of the Emmett Till murder in 1955, with even the victim's father comparing his son's murder to that of Emmet Till. Emmett Till would later be mentioned in the 4th season episode "Fireflies".
• The 4th season premiere "Rampage" was based on and references the Columbine High School massacre.
• The 4th season episode "Lonely Hearts" was based on Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, a.k.a. "The Lonely Hearts Killers", who conned and killed women in the 1940s.^[7]
• The 4th season episode "Blackout" was based on the murder of Florence Unger in 2003.^[8]
• The 4th season finale "Stalker" was loosely based on the murder of the Huling family in Minnesota in 1978.^[9]
• The 5th season premiere "Thrill Kill" was based on the West Memphis Three case.
• The 5th season episode called "Boy Crazy" is loosely based on the Brandon Teena case.

Episodes

Main article: List of Cold Case episodes

U.S. television ratings

Seasonal rankings (based on average total viewers per episode) of Cold Case on CBS.

Note: Each U.S. network television season starts in late September and ends in late May, which coincides with the completion of May sweeps.

References

External links

• Warner Bros. Cold Case official site
• Cold Case at TV Guide
• Cold Case at TV.com

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