‘Unforgettable’? Fuhgeddubahdit

CBS recently added a new show to its Tuesday night lineup.

It’s a crime drama (what a surprise). A police procedural no less. And wait, stop, I think I’ve heard this one – one character has some freaky twist that comes into play in every episode no matter how irrelevant?

It must be “NUMB3RS.” No, that was an ABC production. “The Mentalist”? “Criminal Minds”? “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior”? “NCIS”? “NCIS: LA”? Some new flavor of “CSI”? “Without a Trace”? “Cold Case”? “The Forgotten”? “The Good Wife”? “Medium”? “Hawaii 5-0”? “Blue Bloods”?

No, it’s “Unforgettable.” And I’ve already forgotten it, in and among the rest of the piffle presented by the Tiffany network as crime drama.

I’d thought NBC’s “Prime Suspect” remake presented as cliche, with Maria Bello posing as the driven, hounded, hard-boiled female homicide detective trying to earn grudging respect from her male counterparts, who for their part believe she’s slept her way to her current post.

But here’s Poppy Montgomery and her beautifully effortless red hair looking haunted by life. Because she is. She as Carrie Wells – a former cop convinced in the pilot episode to rejoin the force – has an improbably rare medical condition whereby she is terribly overwrought in everything she does.

Oh, wait, I mean she remembers everything. She can remember every day of her life, all the weather, what happened on all of them.

Except for one day in the woods as a child, when a mysterious figure attacked and killed her sister. For some post-traumatic stress she can’t remember much about that incident – it’s slowly coming back to her in flashes. But she can remember the blood sugar levels of her patients she cares for in the rest home. Because, as it is endlessly driven home, she remembers everything.

Boring

See, I’m already bored by this because a police officer with a super memory isn’t that much more useful than any other. Unless she’s actually witnessed a crime she’ll see what any other investigator would see once she’s on the scene.

Here’s one of the ways Carrie used her special skills in this week’s episode. She saw a tarp in a driveway while entering a crime scene. She saw it again later while leaving and – after about a minute of “remembering” – she determined that the tarp ... had moved!

And lo and behold, she found the hiding place of the boy they were searching for. He’d managed to secure the hiding place despite a yard full of policemen milling about and the driveway he hid in actually guarded by police officers, all of whom were searching for him, so aren’t kids sneaky and adorable? Especially when they’re material witnesses in a homicide investigation?

I mean, the rest of the episode was sheer fantasy. Carrie confronts a suspect and something’s just not right. She’s remembering something about growing up that isn’t sitting well with her. And she talks to the child who’s suffered a traumatic loss, using her memories of being a child who’s suffered a traumatic loss to build a rapport with him and to get him to open up. And she gets the child to identify the guy who murdered his parents in a lineup – not a mugshot lineup, mind you, but an actual real live lineup with real living breathing big scary adult people in it that this little kid has to face through one-way glass and accuse of murdering his parents.

Which I have every reason to believe will totally stand up in court. After all, a traumatized child definitively identified a suspect in a lineup -- the one person in the lineup his family had a prior connection to -- and I’m sure that’s going to be quite satisfactory for any defense attorney and jury in the land.

She did, after all, build that rapport, right?

I think the most tragic thing about this show isn’t just its unfortunate existence. It’s the loss of Dylan Walsh (”Nip/Tuck”) to whatever we might have seen him in otherwise if he hadn’t signed on to this black hole of talent. I’ve always enjoyed his lowkey approach to character work, interspersed with his ready emotional outbursts. My hope is that this terrible show is just a stepping stone to some better network opportunity for him.

Because right now? This show?

Fuhgeddubahdit.

“Unforgettable” airs at 10/9c Tuesdays on CBS.