Are You Watching, The First 48?

A&E: The FIRST 48


When a couple is found shot to death, Kansas City investigators track down two suspects and must convince one of them to give up the other--his own father; and detectives must rely on inhabitants of a drug-ridden area to help solve a murder, hoping that the word on the street will crack the case. Join the detective teams as they race the clock in The First 48.

This series on A&E might seem like an unlikely review for the spirit of this page. But, before you so easily prematurely judge my eclectic taste in programming, consider this: We are a very violent society and every day we endure countless newscasts about the state of our world and it's lack of love or respect for it's neighbors. We violate as many of the ten commandments on a daily basis as we can, it would appear, and we often find our greatest success or notoreity when we do. So along comes a show that is as raw as it gets and in it's rawness is the most honest protrait of real evil on the networks. The First 48 shows us our sins in technicolor detail and if we heed the advice and warnings of the detectives, we might learn not only how to view our neighborhoods but our neighbors, differently. We learn a measure of patience and grace while seeing these admirable men and women performing tasks that many of us would find distasteful no matter how necessary. And, they do it with a combination of grace and peace that's uncanny and extremely humane. These detectives are mothers and fathers, often, with families that need them in the same time period they're away dealing with the worst of mankind. How do they do it? WHY do they do it? Questions such as these will be conversations for the proverbial water coolers as many are tuning in more and more to this crime drama, that's ultimately not a drama at all, but a real horrific tragedy that a show like this could even exist in primetime. Not for the subject matter, mind you, but that there's such a depth of material available for it's creation in the first place! It would appear that this world we're living in is bent on self-destruction, one neighbor and one neighborhood at a time. ~~BD