Boomtown

Pushing another crime drama on the helpless public borders on cruel and unusual, but NBC gets things right with Boomtown. The plot thickens through the eyes of the killer, the detectives, onlookers, and some others before everyone gets together for a trigger-happy final standoff. Jump cuts mess with the time line and maneuver back and forth between characters, keeping the story unresolved long enough to lure you in until the end. Even though the perspective-switching shows the same part of the story three or four times, you’ll be distracted from the repetition: by the proverbial hot-women-with-bad-guys (wearing very little, to boot) and violence as good as it’s going to get on network television this side of Cops. Even Donnie Walhberg hangs tough enough to make his supersleuth character fun to watch as he shows off his two best acting faces: confusion and uncertainty.