'In Justice' is guilty of simplistic plots
You can run, my homicidal-maniacal friends, but you can't hide.
According to most TV crime dramas, and there are a boatload of them right now, no one gets away with murder. The world may be extremely unsafe, what with back-alley stabbings and white-collar shootings and (my favorite) ritualistic eviscerations, but justice will prevail in the end. Even decades after a crime, as ''Cold Case" and ABC's new ''In Justice" have it, the guilty are going to get nailed. These shows have an almost religious belief in final retribution.
''In Justice," which premieres Sunday night at 10 on Channel 5, is yet another decent-enough crime procedural about making life hell for TV's bad guys. You know the drill: A few pretty Sherlocks with computers and cotton swabs track down whodunit, after a few clever writers have misled viewers into an unexpected denouement. The regular characters are generic, and the plots are filled with holes. But as a mindless TV distraction bent on reminding us that the justice system is not perfect, ''In Justice" will do. Plus, Kyle MacLachlan livens up the cast as an egotistical philanthropist who struts around the San Francisco office when he's not courting the media.
The show is set in an organization that tries to free innocent convicts by reinvestigating their cases. Called the National Justice Center, it resembles the real-life Innocence Project in New York, which has exonerated wrongfully imprisoned people since 1992 through biological evidence. For example, in Sunday's ''In Justice," the Center helps a wrongly jailed woman (played with intensity by Marin Hinkle) who was incarcerated for murdering her father. And on Friday at 9, when the series settles into its regular time slot, the organization rescues a convict misidentified at a shoot-out.
MacLachlan's David Swain is the show's puppeteer in residence. He decides which cases the Center will handle, and he plays his trusty gang of lawyers and investigators against one another to get the crimes solved. Yes, there is a trusty gang, a little ensemble of well-coiffed folks who flirt and fret when they're not saving the world. All procedurals are built around such carefully cast groupings. Indeed, sometimes prime time looks like a bowling league of little crime-solving teams, each deserving its own nickname -- the Rolling ''Bones," the ''CSI" Strikers, the ''Cold Case" Kingpins, and the ''Criminal Minds" Crankers.
But I digress.
The ''In Justice" team naturally includes a square-headed hero, a Steve McQueen-looking dude named Charles (played by Jason O'Mara) who bowls to win. An ex-cop, he's an ace in the field. He's divorced, but he's helping his ex-wife get a church annulment by pretending to be an adulterer in front of her priest. At work, he's backed up by a trio of nondescript colleagues played by Marisol Nichols, Constance Zimmer, and Daniel Cosgrove. After two episodes, I still couldn't get a handle on their characters.
My guess is that ''In Justice" won't win any loyal fans, unless the writers learn to tighten up and liven up their plot developments. In the first two episodes, viewers may roll their eyes at how easily the old murders are solved and wonder why these crimes weren't solved properly the first time around. The storytelling is so hokey it's criminal.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. 
