Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders

Criminal Minds doesn’t [turn] away from graphic depictions of violence and Beyond Borders takes it one step further, to a point where gratuitous violence doesn’t build the narrative but instead completely detracts from it.

No doubt plenty of people will be able to ease into the show’s groove thanks to its workmanlike adherence to the franchise’s established and efficient structure, but anyone unmoved by procedural formula won’t find much excuse to go beyond their already established borders.

Beyond Borders, like its predecessors, is by no description a good show, but you can see the warm-bath appeal of its consistency and the insidious way in which it combines splatter-film scare tactics with pop-psychology platitudes and affirmations.

I long ago decided that "UnSub" might also stand for unsubtle, and that I had enough things keeping me up nights not to be spending time with the fearmongers of Criminal Minds. But for those for whom one hour of paranoia is never enough, Beyond Borders offers a glimpse of a wider world, though one perhaps too frightening to be explored in person.

The last thing we need as viewers is any show this terrible, scary or not.

Beyond comprehension, beyond silly, beyond words.

In other words, more of the same, with the added twist that all the victims are American and all (or most) of the criminals are not.... Imagine the situation reversed--a show in which tourists to America were continually victimized in horrific ways--and you see the problem.

Logistically, the producers get some credit for approximating all these far-away locales. But any ingenuity pretty much ends there, and Sinise’s character is so gruff and gravely as to make David Caruso’s old “CSI” role look emotionally effusive.

The opening hour, premiering Wednesday after Survivor and Criminal Minds--and those are exactly the two shows Beyond Borders combines with appalling cynicism--finds Garrett and his team winging off to Thailand, where a couple of young American women, volunteering on a farm, are taken captive by a demented-looking local. (Given that despicable behavior by foreign populations is baked into its premise, Beyond Borders is, you can be sure, going to be charged with xenophobia or worse by some offended viewers very quickly.)