The Boston Herald (Sept. 2002)

UPN’s detective series shows promise but is `Haunted’ by cliches.

Two stars (out of four)

You’d think Frank Taylor would appreciate the leg up he has on other private investigators. After all (stage whisper, please): HE SEES DEAD PEOPLE. This skill could come in handy when the only witnesses to a crime are the perp and his victim, and they’re both dead.

But Frank’s creeped out by hearing random whispers of “help us.” And even though the victim’s ghost tries to lead him to the truth, the killer is just as determined to thwart him.

That’s the promising premise of “Haunted,” UPN’s new paranormal detective series premiering tomorrow at 9 p.m. on WSBK (Ch. 38). The show stars Matthew Fox (”Party of Five”) as an investigator who has a near-death experience and discovers the dead are trying to tell him something.

Frank was haunted even before his brief walk to the Other Side. Two years earlier, while he was a happily married cop, he ignored a bump in the night and woke up to find his young son had been kidnapped. Now the boy is presumed dead, and Frank is off the force and working as a PI, divorced from his prosecutor wife, Jess (Lynn Collins), and tortured with guilt.

That’s what leads him one dark and stormy night (really!) to confront a scumbag suspected of kidnapping a boy named Billy (Riley Cantner) and his teenage babysitter. This hotshot move ends badly: the babysitter and the suspect wind up dead, Frank is gravely wounded and Billy is still missing.

At the hospital, Frank’s heart stops, and before the doctors shock him back to life, he has the standard out-of-body experience, complete with a distant wave from his dead son.

After that setup, we get down to the business of the night’s case - finding Billy before it’s too late. When the spirits first contact him, Frank thinks he’s losing his mind. The PI training manual doesn’t cover stuff like eerily spinning boxes, a showerhead that spews mud or scary confrontations with a dead villain. But when Frank lets go and trusts his instincts - and the spooky voices - they lead him in the right direction

While the central idea of “Haunted” is intriguing, cliches pile up in the pilot quicker than fast-food wrappers in the back of a Crown Vic. We’ve got the blind guy who sees the truth more clearly than anybody else, the sad-but-determined-to-move-on ex-wife and the exasperated ex-partner (Russell Hornsby), who risks his own badge to indulge Frank’s weird hunches.

Fox, Collins and Hornsby all strike a consistently grim note throughout, which works for this episode but will get tiresome pretty fast. They need to give these characters more complexity. To that end, a little humor now and then wouldn’t hurt.

Still, there’s potential here. In an achingly sad moment, Billy’s frantic parents are reunited with their son just as Frank’s ex arrives on the scene. As Jess and Frank watch, you can see the pain flicker across their faces: WHY COULDN’T WE HAVE HAD THIS HAPPY ENDING?

The producers promise that part of the mystery each week will be figuring out whether the spirits are there to help Frank or hurt him. Sounds good. But a man spooked by his own grief and regrets is more interesting than a man haunted only by ghosts. Let’s hope the team at “Haunted” remembers that.