Cop series 'Line of Fire' resurfaces with a two-hour movie finale

The movie shows both the strengths and weaknesses the series had.
By RICK KUSHMAN
SACRAMENTO BEE
Networks sweeps just ended, all the finales have run, so it's time to get back to the last remnants of some shows that just disappeared on you recently.
One of those is ABC's "Line of Fire," a better-than-average cop series that looked at parallel "families": a Richmond, Va., crime syndicate and the Richmond FBI agents trying to stop them.
ABC resurrects two episodes tonight and makes them into a two-hour movie that, for one, holds together even if you didn't watch the series earlier this year, and for another, shows glimpses of the lost potential.
The "movie," "Line of Fire: Eminence Front," keeps the parallel theme when both of those families are attacked -- an agent's daughter is shot and a mob boss' wife is raped -- and it shows both the strengths and the weaknesses the series had.
The show has an edge and a starkness of both action and emotion that's rare for the networks, and it's willing to leave complicated issues unresolved. Plus the scripts are drawn tightly, with less of the typical slow, network-enforced overstatement of anxieties so no single viewer will miss the point.
Show can't compare
But "Line of Fire" is no "The Sopranos," although ABC wanted it to be. While it does give us some genuine texture -- the agents have their issues and the mobsters have their humanity -- it's all too network-TV-style obvious.
Instead of the subtle, layered discord among characters in top-class dramas like "The Sopranos," where they are never really aware of the forces that drive them, much of "Line of Fire's" character battles are dumbed down and so much less interesting.
A big conflict for the lead agent (Leslie Hope) is losing custody of her kids, which comes straight from the network manual of crime-fighter conflicts. Or at one point Sunday, the big mob boss (David Paymer) gives a trite "What have we come to?" speech that says, really, I don't know. I couldn't follow, but it was something about violence used to be OK when it wasn't cruel. Or something.
Still, "Line of Fire" shows flashes of originality and depth, and you get the sense it would have been much better if ABC had just left it alone.