'Jesse Stone: Benefit of the Doubt' on CBS HD

For those of you who are fans of the late Robert B. Parker's detective stories (Spenser, Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, etc.), the eighth Jesse Stone movie Jesse Stone: Benefit of the Doubt will be broadcast in HD on Sunday May 20 on primetime CBS.

Teaser: http://www.imdb.com/video/cbs/vi273589017/

Unlike the first four films, the fifth through eighth movies are original scripts, not based on a Parker novel.

Tom Selleck reprises his role as Jesse Stone, the Chief of Police in the New England small town of Paradise, Mass. The stories are beautifully filmed in HD with a solid supporting cast that includes Viola Davis and Kathy Baker as deputies. The Jesse Stone novels are tight and stylish "police procedural" stories, fully adult in nature and well written. Jesse Stone is a complex character who struggles with an alcohol addiction, his feelings for his ex-wife, his demanding job, and a series of beautifull girlfriends. Tom Selleck is at least 20 years older than the Jesse Stone character in the novels, but I'll have to say he has been uniformly excellant in the first seven films.

No, these are not action films. Most often, Jesse fires a single shot in a scene near the end of the film.

If you missed the prior broadcasts these were the earlier films:

Stone Cold (2005, available on DVD)
Jesse Stone: Night Passage (2006, available on DVD)
Jesse Stone: Death In Paradise (2006, available on DVD)
Jesse Stone: Sea Change (2007, available on DVD)
Jesse Stone: Thin Ice (2009, available on DVD)
Jesse Stone: No Remorse (2010, available on DVD)
Jesse Stone: Innocents Lost (2011, available on DVD)


Note: If you want to catch up, view Jesse Stone: Night Passage first, as the novels were filmed out of order, and Night Passage is the series beginning, relating how a drunken Los Angeles homicide cop got his job after a painfull divorce.

For reference, the Robert B. Parker novels are:

Night Passage (1997)
Trouble In Paradise (1998)
Death In Paradise (2001)
Stone Cold (2003)
Sea Change (2006)
High Profile (2007)
Stranger in Paradise (2008)
Night and Day (2009)
Split Image (2010)

Don't forget to set your DVRs for the HD broadcast, Sunday May 20.

What I find so annoying is that all of the real cops look so incompetent compared to the TV cops. The real cops chase people for years and never find them. The real cops don't even collect DNA or forensic evidence of any kind in most cases, because the crime lab costs money not in the budget.

The wife and I count the blood and guts stories every night on the news. Here is sunny California, there are 3.4 stories about shootings, traffic accidents, family violence, etc. for every other type. Obviously the cops are losing.

I just noticed that the first three TV movies (Night Passage, Stone Cold,and Death In Paradise) are available in NetFlix streaming. However I reccomend the DVDs as the best alternative, as the streaming versions suffer greatly from the video compression used. AFAIK BluRay is not an option.

The best version you will see is the HD broadcast. But CBS typically broadcasts these once and repeats it only once some months later. The area of Nova Scotia that subs for Paradise, Mass. has gorgeous scenery, and the TV movies have better Cinematography than most. I enjoy watching these in the Home Theater on the front projector.

For what it's worth, I found the plot of the latest movie to be extremely sparse. Yes, I know that is Robert B. Parker's style, but there can be too much of a good thing. I would have appreciated a few more details in this latest case, it felt like a half movie.

Exactly. I got it, he bottomed out and then recovered, aided by a relationship with sultry torch singer "Thelma". Then he figured out who the real boss of the drug trade was, killed the hit man, and Luther "Suitcase" Simpson returned. But it was all so sparse it seemed like some scenes were missing.

Either the writing or the editing seems to have been a notch downward in quality this time.