As part of NBC's revamped Thursday comedy block, Andy Barker fits in well enough, with a sweet, off-kilter charm reminiscent of the night's lead-off show, My Name is Earl. But as a replacement for 30 Rock, which it's displacing for its six-week run, it's far from adequate. There are some genial chuckles to be had from this show, primarily thanks to the likeable cast, but no real laugh-out-loud moments, something that 30 Rock has in abundance. And although it has some of the out-there quirkiness of skits on O'Brien's talk show (the host is credited as co-creator), mostly it's predictable and safe.
Then again, predictable and safe have become the watchwords of the crime procedural genre, and despite its own set of quirks, the drama Raines (Thursdays, 10 p.m.; moves to Fridays, 9 p.m. starting March 30) is both. It stars Jeff Goldblum as Michael Raines, an LAPD detective who sees what appear to be ghosts of the murder victims he investigates. But unlike Medium's Allison Dubois, Raines isn't actually meant to be psychic—the apparitions are merely figments of his imagination, who only know as much about their own lives as Raines does at any given time.
It's an odd premise, and one that creator Graham Yost (Boomtown) doesn't always pull off. The spirits vacillate between behaving like investigative tools and traditional ghosts, asking Raines to put some closure on their lives, like Jennifer Love Hewitt does on Ghost Whisperer. The crimes are standard fare, but the show's real appeal is Goldblum himself, who is as odd and twitchy as ever. Yost plays this up, giving Raines a love for old noir films (which informs the tone of the show) and letting Goldblum deadpan some great lines, including telling a gardener who asks about his conversations with people who aren't there that the dead are about to rise, and are hungry for brains.
Neither of these shows is breaking new ground, but if you're sick of the dryness of your regular procedurals, or just miss having Andy Richter or Jeff Goldblum on your TV, they'll keep you relatively entertained and, of course, wrap up that murder by the time the credits roll.