HDTV Heads-Up: Will More Crime Pay for TV3?

TV3 is betting on more HD crime dramas to succeed where others have failed.

It’s reviving CSI: Miami to improve its 9.30pm Sunday ratings and will replace the ebbing Hawaii Five-0 with Underbelly movies.

The first of these, Underbelly: Tell Them Lucifer Was Here, will screen 8.30pm on May 11, instead of Five-0 and its much more popular stablemate, Sons of Anarchy, which ends its second season on Wednesday.

Lucifer screened on Australian TV in February, where TV Tonight described the telemovie about the murder of two Victorian policemen as “far more serious than merely being a cheap shot to have actors get their gear off”.

Concurred Molkstvtalk: The show had a different feel about it as opposed to the normal series where the character development can layer and the plot wind through some dark places – this telemovie had to be sharp and punchy to deliver the payoff inside two-and-a-half hours (it did run decidedly overtime).

“Tell Them Lucifer Was Here delivered in spades.”

It’s one of three telemovies commissioned under the Underbelly Files banner, the others being Infiltration and The Man Who Got Away, which presumably will air back-to-back here as they did in Australia.

Although Lucifer topped the ratings the night of its Channel Nine premiere, the Sydney Morning Herald reported “its audience of over a million viewers still fell well short of the franchise’s peak two years ago”.

Meanwhile, Nine’s website has a sneak peek of the next Underbelly series, Razor, which provides a Boardwalk Empire spin on organised crime across the Tasman.

Fans of CSI: Miami can look forward to a series rejuvenation with the start of the police procedural’s ninth season.

“We’re answering the call with essentially a relaunch of our entire series in every category,” producer Barry O’Brien says in TV3’s publicity notes.

Among the storylines will be a “massive” prison break that will have crime lab boss Horatio Caine (David Caruso) hot on the trail of the escapees for most of the season.

“It puts a group of Horatio Caine’s most desperate and dangerous enemies on the street gunning for him,” O’Brien says.

“You’re going to meet a new Horatio Cane. He’s going to be unleashed, unrestrained in suspect’s faces in a way that he’s never been before.

“He’s more passionate than ever, and more dramatic and more compelling from a character standpoint. It’s a David Caruso you haven’t seen and certainly won’t forget!”

CSI: Miami will screen in-between the return of House at 8.30pm and The Good Wife at 10.25pm.