Women’s Murder Club, a new crime-drama series running Friday nights at 10 EDT, sounds like a reasonably good idea: four San Francisco(?) professional women involved in various aspects of crime-solving work on cases together. One is a homicide detective, one a prosecutor, one’s a medical examiner, and the other is a reporter.

Unfortunately, in the execution the program doesn’t work out nearly as well as one might hope. One would think that solving murders had a certain intrinsic impprtance and thus could serve as sufficient to hold an audience’s attention. It has certainly worked for countless shows in the past. In some, such as Columbo, the detective has almost no personal life at all, for all we know, yet the narratives are quite compelling.

Women’s Murder Club takes the opposite approach. The show focuses an abnormal amouint of attention on three of the four women’s personal lives, in particular their love lives.

And those love lives are just not very interesting. The homicide detective’s ex-lover becomes her boss early in the pilot episode, which makes for some mildly uncomfortable moments but is a huge cliche situation nowadays, and then she finds out that he is getting married to someone else, an even bigger dramatic cliche.

The same is true for the other two central female characters—their love lives just aren’t that interesting, perhaps in part because the narrative time that must be spent on the murder mystery means that their situations cannot be explored in any great depth. The reporter’s love life is not addressed in the pilot episode, and that bit of reticence on the part of the producers actually makes her the most interesting of the lead characters.

In addition, the murder story ends up hinging on the love lives of the suspects and victim. Obviously the idea here is that a show geared toward women must have a strong element of soap opera love-story material. Yet the program clearly has a feminist angle to it, in trying to show that a team of women can solve mysteries as well as a team of men can—as if there could be any plausible doubt of that anyway.

The show’s basic problem is that juxtaposing romantic problems with murder cases greatly diminishes the importance of the former by comparison. That’s not only bad feminism, it’s bad drama.