TV has a new bad boy.

To TV’s pair of outspoken atheists has been added a cranky young homicide dick and slob, Backstrom.

He joins Doctor Gregory House and Patrick Jane, the former a brilliant diagnostician and mean pig anyone would rather shoot than work for and the latter a sociopathic ex-confidence man and murderer.

You get the idea.

All three are more outspoken about their personal beliefs – atheism, nihilism – than anyone is apt to find real occasion to be in a normal work environment, even to the point of being rather aggressive, each in his own degree.

I have no idea why TV-land persists in creating such characters, but the same writers who make them more than a bit louche feel the need to sometimes have some mouthpiece for The Common Man, The Ordinary Good American, give him a piece of his credulous, meaning-loving, God-needing, something-greater-than-ourselves-clinging, and very mushy mind.

Which always leaves the bad boy crestfallen and defeated with no smart-mouth backtalk, nothing to say.

Dr. Deb in episode 3.

Update, 02212015.

How did I forget Elementary's Sherlock Holmes?

I watch it all the time, and still.

Perhaps because as the series has progressed the scripts have simply left out reference to such things, much as The Mentalist in later episodes pretty much ignored Jane's atheism, his criminal past, his murder, his present crimes, and his sociopathy.