The Glades, Review by Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

Kiele Sanchez as Callie Cargil, The Glades

If all you did was watch television, you could easily get the idea every person in America is either killing someone, about to be killed by someone, or trying to catch the people killing someone. So you’d have to think the last thing we need in an already fetid TV summer are two more crime shows. And you’d be right, at least when it comes to Haven — a show that wouldn’t be any more welcome in cooler weather.

So let’s start with the better news offered by A&E’s wade into the summer scripted waters: The Glades, a cop procedural that seems designed to attract folks who flock to USA’s brand of “blue sky” comic crime shows. And it just may do so, thanks to a newcomer who’d fit right in with USA’s stable of easy-to-like, easy-on-the-eyes male stars, Australian import Matt Passmore.

Created by White Collar‘s Clifton Campbell, Glades casts Passmore as Jim Longworth, a brilliant but acerbically difficult detective who is newly and unhappily transferred from Chicago to the Everglades‘ Palm Glade.

Like most such TV crime-solving characters, he’s a slightly annoying know-it-all, lording his expertise in “all things homicidal” over his hapless partner (John Carroll Lynch) and the local medical examiner (Carlos Go´mez) who is also his only friend.

But he makes up for it, at least from a viewer’s standpoint, with flashes of goofy charm, obsessing over golf, burritos and the beautiful nurse who bandages his alligator bite; Kiele Sanchez. (more…)