By Curt Schleier

MURDER is much more than just a new Spike TV series (Tuesdays at 10 p.m.).  It is also a signal that Western civilization as we know it is already well in decline.
   
Who’d a thunk it? A game show about homicides. What’s next? American Pedophile?
   
There is so much wrong with this program I don’t know where to begin.  The premise, I guess, is that if you watch enough episodes of CSI and LAW & ORDER, you’re just one tin badge away from the homicide squad.  That, of course, is the equivalent of saying if you watch enough ER and GREY’S ANATOMY, you can appear as a contestant on a surgical game show. 
   
Homicide dicks are the crème de la crème. Rookies just out of the police academy aren’t assigned to the squad, and they’ve just finished training in crime scene and other police procedures.  So there’s no way in a heck a group amateurs aren’t going to wind up looking foolish.
   
And that’s pretty much what happens.  Six reasonably intelligent and attractive young people — a couple of law students (including one who is a former gang banger), a fire fighter, a paramedic and others — are divided into two teams and have to try to figure out who done it.  Done what?  Brutally murder a husband and wife.
   
First stop the two teams make is to a recreation of the blood-splattered crime scene.There are two very gruesome, life-like (no pun intended) dummies there (god I hope those were dummies) awaiting them.  One team immediately contaminates the crime scene and the other doesn’t do much better, though to their credit no one barfs when they spot brain matter and hair on the walls.
   
Next they’re told who the suspects are.  Suspect #1 is John, a tenant whose rifle was found at the scene. Suspect #3 is the 16-year-old daughter who was dating Suspect # 4 Jose, an illegal immigrant.  Where was suspect #2? Don’t know. None of the contestants ask about him or her. Either the people at MURDER can’t count or for whatever reason any reference to suspect #2 was edited out. That kind of editing assumes an audiences isn’t smart enough to notice.  And it is also a tacit acknowledgment that the show is designed for the less mentally gifted among us for whom the site of mutilated, lifelike dummy corpses is occasion to quaff another beer.
   
But I digress. The point is that there is no logic let along police science here. The contestants obviously don’t get to conduct suspect interviews, though they are shown video (or recreations) of actual police interviews. They are handed other info as well.  But if the police (as I assume they would) think to investigate Sarah’s school counselors to see if there has lately been any change in her behavior, if there has been any social worker intervention of late, it’s not mentioned.
   
Both teams get the right criminal — hey, you knew it was the daughter, too, didn’t you — and have a good idea of how she did it.  But they don’t really have enough evidence to convict her. The show’s host, Det. Tommy Le Noir, of the Arlington, Texas, PD provides more details but doesn’t offer much more info in the way the cops secured a conviction. Did they get a confession? They had to have done something beyond what was revealed.
   
Finally, no doubt as a form absolution, someone explains that the victorious team (the one that got closest to the truth) gets to donate its winnings to a crime victim’s charity.  No other details offered.