TV REVIEW

“Murder in the First” 10 p.m. Mondays, TNT vealing about how television has advanced — and regressed — over two decades.

It’s startling to see how very few African-American characters were on the 1995 show — Vanessa Williams had a small part. The lead characters on “Murder in the First,” are of all races and ethnicities; more women are in top positions.

But when it comes to storytelling, “Murder One” in many ways seems more modern: The camera work was more ambitious and artful, and its hero was a bulky, bald and somewhat charmless defense attorney, Teddy Hoffman (Daniel Benzali), whose family life unfolded elliptically, over time. (Patricia Clarkson played his wife in a cast that included Stanley Tucci and Mary McCormack.)

“Murder in the First” doesn’t really find its groove until the second episode. The pilot wastes a lot of time establishing the somewhat trite bona fides of its leads, two San Francisco detectives who are assigned to a high-priority homicide.

Hildy Mulligan (Kathleen Robertson) is a single mother struggling to raise her daughter with little help from her shiftless ex, and Terry English (Taye Diggs) is a devoted and grief-stricken husband whose wife is dying of cancer.

For some reason, television likes divorcees and widowers more than the reverse, probably on the reflex assumption that a divorced woman is always the wronged party and that a single man is more sympathetic if he lost his wife through misfortune, not carelessness.

Once the story moves on to murder, things pick up. Perhaps predictably, the initial prime suspect in this narrative isn’t a movie star or a real estate tycoon. He is a Silicon Valley wunderkind, Erich Blunt (Tom Felton), whose company is about to go public.

Bochco, whose credits include “Hill Street Blues” and “L.A. Law,” is known for leavening his dramas with eccentric secondary characters, and in this show, which he created with Eric Lodal, one of the detectives on the squad, David Molk (Raphael Sbarge), is awkward, vain and a little silly. But like other Bochco characters, that’s not all he is.

Classic TNT shows like “The Closer” or “Franklin & Bash” have a tendency to lean cute, and sometimes cloyingly so. “Murder in the First” tries to have a glimmer of humor without loosening its suspenseful grip.