Eyewitness

The intrusion of urban mayhem into the pastoral small-town setting gives Eyewitness an unsettlingly claustrophobic sense of a village under siege. You may not want to live there, but I bet you'll want to visit once a week.

It is satisfying, and it has characters that feel as real as truth, and at the end of its scant ten episodes, its overblown, awkward beginning feels comparatively unimportant in the context of a series that tackles big issues on a small scale as juicily and successfully as this.

As Eyewitness proceeds, there are some credibility-stretching coincidences and relationships that are revealed that you might find difficult to accept without rolling your eyes--some of the plot strands tie together rather too neatly. But Nicholson is terrific, and if you’re in the mood for a bleak mystery in the same general area of The Killing or Top of the Lake, Eyewitness is worth a look.

TV isn’t often all that interested in the grittier aspects of life, death, and addiction in unexceptional small towns, and it’s even more difficult to find stories about the LGBT individuals who live in those kinds of tightly knit communities. When it focuses on those elements of its narrative, the viewpoint of Eyewitness becomes not just valuable but admirably precise.

Eyewitness is a competent procedural with well-drawn characters and solid performances, especially by Nicholson, Paxton, Young and Bellows. It goes off the rails a few episodes in with a character switcheroo that strains credibility, but the struggles of the two boys to protect themselves from being slaughtered for what they’ve witnessed, and Helen’s determination to get to the bottom of the killings, hold our attention well enough.

The second-chance-at-love chemistry between Bellows and Nicholson and the first-chance-at-love Philip-Lukas pairing are just a couple of the things Eyewitness has to set it apart, but angles it doesn't handle well enough to make up for icky, one-dimensional villains, a humdrum crime story and a tone that defies engagement.

The characters that are introduced don’t come off as individuals even for a moment, but rather, as simply functioning as elements of a dramatic mechanism, creaking and whirling in repetition.