Losing The Finder

Fox's freshman show The Finder was officially cancelled in April.  The backdoor spinoff of Bones was the latest in the quirky crime genre that includes Monk, Psych, and White Collar.  While The Finder played the quirkiness card very well, most of the show's other attributes were rather shallow or misdirected.  For starters, the recurring storyline had the greatest focus on the supporting characters, leaving little for the protagonist, Walter Sherman (played by Geoff Stults).  What little story Walter was given seemed to be deliberately downplayed and neglected.  This coupled with an already risky concept gave Fox an excuse for "The Firefly treatment." 



Fox, of course, is a bit culpable in this.  Despite being a spinoff of Bones, the two shows never aired on the same night.  Furthermore, Bones was still in its off-season for The Finder's first half.  A spinoff is usually most successful when (if possible) aired in conjunction with the origin show, at least for the first season.  The two visiting cast members from Bones were not enough to compensate for this.  In addition, there was the usual rigamarole of airing the episodes out of order.  Fox, it seems, gave up rather early and moved The Finder to Friday nights, which is the same as picking up a shotgun and taking it behind the shed.  And on a cliffhanger no less.  

Airing Order                                              Accurate Order              
An Orphan Walks Into a Bar                     An Orphan Walks Into a Bar       
Bullets                                                     The Last Meal                            
A Cinderella Story                                    The Conversation
Swing and a Miss                                      Life After Death
The Great Escape                                      A Cinderella Story
Little Green Men                                       Swing and a Miss
Eye of the Storm                                       Voodoo Undo
Life After Death                                        Bullets 
The Last Meal                                          The Great Escape
The Conversation                                      Little Green Men
The Inheritance                                         Eye of the Storm
Voodoo Undo                                           The Inheritance
The Boy With the Bucket                          The Boy With the Bucket

The show's premise was extremely high risk from the get go.  Most crime shows differ in  their methodology, like the obsessive compulsive who notices details no one else does, to the fake psychic with an eidetic memory, to the reformed thief, and lest we forget the various forensic approaches.  Each crime show focuses on different methods to solve high stakes crimes like murder and grand theft.  Walter Sherman didn't solve crimes specifically.  He looked for missing objects, or sometimes missing people.  Now, usually the missing object was tied to some criminal activity just to raise the stakes, but for the most part, it started with some person looking for a lost thing to make themselves feel better.  This difference in objective did help the character stand out and left plenty of room for character growth.  Unfortunately, the writers didn't get that far.

The backdoor pilot that aired on Bones suggested three things  would be explored in the character: his strange "finder power", his love life, and the wartime head trauma in Iraq that gave him his ability but also left him mentally handicapped.  The series only explored one of these, and not very deeply.  His Iraq experience was explained away in a single sentence and then shelved forever.  The lingering questions of why he was so paranoid or so socially irreverent were never picked up on.  His finder methods broke down into four categories.  

1. I'm 'a Risk It: Like many TV p.i.s, Walter had to break-and-enter, steal, and lie to authorities in pursuit of an investigation.  He usually had his legal advisor, Leo (played by Michael Clarke Duncan), present to give an exact statement of which law he would be breaking, just to cement the point and set up his catchphrase. 
2. Build Me A Diorama: Walter usually recreated some scene via scale diorama to figure something out.  There was always some character who declared Walter would never figure something out that way, and in way, they were right.  Walter usually didn't deduce anything from the diorama that he couldn't have found out another way (and that he no doubt spent a long time building).  He just used it to organize his thoughts, and then injected other information he knew to explain some clue or breakthrough to be followed.  Some of the dioramas were overly gimmicky and/or made absolutely no sense.  
3. Dream A Little Dream: As an attempt to point out Walter's altered mental state, Walter often made breakthroughs on a case through a dream.  The sequences were usually a trip through a thematic Wonderland with some interesting visuals.  They often delivered an ambiguous message that only Walter would understand and wouldn't be clear to the audience until he explained it.   
4. Gadgets and Gizmos: Probably the most ill fitting technique, Walter would often build various gadgets to help him in his various quests.  He didn't do it too often, but when he did, they were often strange devices with odd contributions.  It started in the first episode when he had a robot that created footstep sounds to confuse a suspect.  Then in Voodoo Undo, he had a giant ball track that supposedly served as a computing device.  It's never clear how Walter acquired the expertise to build these contraptions and their relation to his searches often bordered on the Deus Ex Machina.  

These methods were somewhat creative and imaginative, but not very efficient.  Most of the other characters were confounded by Walter's methods, but usually just rolled their eyes and went with it.  He's the hero, right, he'll solve it somehow.  

Since Walter's methods had a hit-and-miss charm to them, most of his appeal was in his irreverent attitude and (for the ladies) his rugged good looks.  What his character fell short on was his desire, or lack thereof.  He had no overall objective to work towards; nothing that could be expected for him to want and not have.  He already had a "friends with benefits" relationship with the female lead, so there was no romantic tension.  No missing object he never found, no unsolved crime hanging over his head, nothing for the audience to look forward to on his behalf until the very last episode of the season (i.e. the series); too little too late.  For this reason, he had no story arc whatsoever, which meant another character had to carry one for him.  

Willa, the teenage gypsy (played by Maddie Hasson), was a new element introduced after the pilot for the series proper as a replacement for Ike, the thick accented British pilot bartender (played by Saffron Burrows).  Willa was a sassy troubled teen trying to create a new life while working against the criminal forces of her old.  Fortunately for her, she got the most character development of the entire cast.  Unfortunately for everyone else, her story had nothing to do with Walter, missing objects, or any other aspect of the show.  It didn't contribute at all to the concept of the series.  Individually, she could contribute with some computer or petty theft skills, but her overall story did not.  The writers put so much material into her, they probably could have created a separate series (The Sopranos with gypsies).  At best, Willa's arc was a meaningless B story.  At worst, an overplayed distraction.  Ike's departure, despite being a reaction to fan response, subtracted from the show.  In the pilot, Walter, Leo, and Ike made up a diverse but well oiled team highly reminiscent of Magnum, Higgins, T.C., and Rick.  Willa was third party rookie intruding on a partnership, reminiscent of Amy and the A Team (we know how well that worked out).   Ike could have contributed to the concept while still having her own story, but Willa competed for screen time and muddled the show's story.

While I mentioned that the concept was high risk, I believe that it could have survived given proper development and stronger writing.  Most of the mistakes were in direction.  With no character arc, romance, or variations on the material, the show became less interesting very quickly.  A contributing factor would likely be the use of writing techniques from Bones, which relies on a predictable forensic methodology.  Bones also has the advantage of several novels worth of material to work from, coupled with the author, Kathy Reichs.  The Finder only had two books (The Locator series), and with the format heavily altered, I don't imagine they were too useful for inspiration.  Crime shows work best when the characters are truly challenged by both the nature of the crimes and the stakes to solve them.  While it was clear Walter craved challenges, he found very few.  Since his methods were so quirky, it was often hard to tell how difficult a particular case was, though it was very easy to see how difficult a time the writers were having.  Their focus on less relevant story elements suggested they just didn't know how to expand the concept material.  It just may have been too bold a concept for this production team.   

If there is one thing I can say to describe the show's failure, it would be lack of enthusiasm.  The writers didn't have enough passion for material to make it engaging.  Fox didn't seem to care enough about the show to give it all the support it could have had and gave up on it very quickly.   The only hope for any resolution now lies with Bones, and it will be, at best, only a partial recovery (much like The Lone Gunmen's return to The X Files).  Since Bones is on the rocks itself, it may not happen, and if so, The Finder will have to take it's place in the forgotten footnotes of successful shows.