My VCR in the living room has been set for months to tape ABC on Sunday nights from 9 until 11. I was considerably surprised when I got done with an episode of Alias a few weeks ago (Jennifer Garner, not Brian Michael Bendis) and saw Ed O'Neill's grim mug glaring out at me. I still had time to set up a Monday taping of The Practice, so I decided to give something new a shot.

The newest iteration of Dragnet shares the same clipped tone and monotonous voiceover as the Jack Webb classic, but it's nothing special, nobody's appointment TV (especially since it's up against the riveting Boomtown and has Law & Order: Criminal Intent on the same night as well). Dick Wolf has created another fairly innocuous police procedural, this one just borrows some names and music from a TV classic.

On its own, this wouldn't have grabbed my attention at all. I was watching along, vaguely, and reading an issue of Mike Carey's Lucifer at the same time. I noticed, somewhere along the first interview with the woman who turned out to be the killer, that O'Neill's voiceovers were astonishingly similar to the kinds of captions in Luficifer, and even more so to any gritty book by the aforementioned Mister Bendis.

Having a new context in which to watch the show, I started paying close attention. It was a bit difficult to take the leads seriously -- I kept expecting Peg Bundy to shuffle on-camera and ask for sex, and seeing the goofy bastard from Vegas Vacation grimly slapping on latex gloves and examining crime scenes was somewhat jarring. Once I got past that (not an easy proposition, admittedly, especially for Embry), I was able to see the nuts and bolts of the show. Simple detective work, none of the dramatic intensity you'd see from the fat guy on NYPD Blue nor any of the amazing feats of deduction that Bobby Goren makes commonplace on L&O:CI. No "watch the screen every second" skills needed, like The X-Files or even the aforementioned Boomtown. You could watch this show, vaguely, and be entertained. Vaguely.

The story would fall flat without Friday's commentary, his thoughts even between the sentences of other actors. It plays with the malleability of time in the same way a comic book does, where a character can have an entire monologue between punches.

It's not exactly like it's a new thing -- Webb''s voiceovers also stepped inside his head during the events of the cases, a gift that comics surely originated (that kind of introspective filmmaking took decades to get done, fighting the old studio system, and found few footholds other than Dragnet in the '60s, despite the larger national appeal of comics at the time).

Traces of this kind of editorializing can be found in other shows: "Captain's log, stardate ..." Sound familiar? The device of voiceovers has been in the cinematic tookbox for some time ... somehow I missed it's application here, though. In an age where many malign and marginalize comics as a bastard art form, it's just refreshing to take note where they actually not only do it right, but lead the way.

In the introductory issue of Write Now! comics vet Danny FIngeroth breaks down some of what he feels are the difference between comics and motion pictures, which would include TV. On the subject of interior monologue, he says, "If a character speaks in voiceover, it can take a while for the audience to get used to it. In the hands of a lazy writer, voiceover is just a way to get exposition across. In the hands of a talented and thoughful writer, it adds a novelistic aspect." He then turns his attention to narrative captions, which comics can do in a unique way no other media can (i.e. in conjuction with pictures), saying "narrative captions can ease transitions, add dramatic or comedic color, emphasize a point, or cover for confusing art, among other things." O'Neill's character does transitions via voicover often, and his dry wit often adds much needed flavor to the drabness of the character and the investigations.

Is the one dramatic device of voiceovers, peeking into Ed O'Neill's head, enough to keep viewers (as no other character has it, and characters other than Embry barely exist at all)? Hard to say -- the ratings are passable for the show, but they're not gonna scare the makers of Joe Millionaire any time soon. It's just an interesting parallel to observe, given how much comic books have influenced media in the last few years (from Road to Perdition to this summer's metahuman blockbusters), when so little of the credit (and more importantly, so little of the revenue) ever comes home.