Without a Trace
From TeeVeePedia, the Internet TV Encyclopedia.
Without A Trace is an hour-long procedural crime drama on CBS set in New York City and is therefore guaranteed a ratings spot in the top ten just for showing up. The stories concern a group of unfeasibly attractive FBI agents who spend their time looking for missing people in between angsting, having flashbacks to their tragic childhood traumas, keeping serious medical conditions from each other, and having UST (or sometimes even full-blown sex) with one another.
It stars Anthony LaPaglia as Jack Malone, the obligatory alpha male with an adolescent trauma, and Eric Close, who plays Pretty Boy #1 - WASP version with controlling father. (Enrique Murciano plays Pretty Boy #2 - Latino version with now dead but once abusive father). The other two characters are played by Brenda Blethyn's daughter and Marilyn Monroe. Between them the characters cover enough flaws and neuroses to keep all the therapists in Manhattan lawfully employed, and include an alcoholic, a drug addict, a commitmentaphobic, an adulterer, and a character who – going by his choice of pin-up material – is almost certainly a supporter of the Republican Party. More recently, the cast – apparently not deemed quite unrealistically attractive enough yet by CBS – was joined by a Hot Latino Chick.
In the past Jack and Sam have had sex, Sam and Martin have had sex, Danny and Martin have constant UST on the show and full-blown sex in Slash fanfiction, and everyone is hoping that Sam and the Hot Latino Chick will be having sex sometime very soon.
Its audience is large but frequently confused as, with the show being an hour-long procedural crime drama set in New York City they expect it to deal with the protracted and grisly murders of attractive young people, but many of the people who go missing are neither young nor attractive, and the show’s writers persist in letting the team find many of the missing people alive and unmutilated, thereby guaranteeing they will never overturn CSI in the ratings. This is even more confusing for the Eric Close fans, who at the end of each episode are still waiting for his character to ride off into the sunset with his cowboy buddies.
The FCC recently fined the show several million dollars for failing to maintain the legally required quota of violence and exploitation and for corrupting young people by warning them of the dangers of unprotected sex.
