Milo Ventimiglia Is Helping to Make Crimes Shows Hot and Steamy Again

When Bones ended its 12-year-long run one Tuesday night in 2017, the finale signified more than just the conclusion of a beloved TV show. The FOX series, about a quirky forensic anthropologist and a cocky FBI agent who investigate murders together and eventually fall in love, was the last of the long-running romantic crime dramedies on network television.

A beloved mainstay of network TV since the days of Moonlighting’s Hayes and Addison and The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully, the romantic crime series dominated the broadcast scene until the late 2010s, when the shows began to slip off of traditional broadcast radars.

Following the finales of CBS’s The Mentalist and ABC’s Castle, similar series—including Take Two (the Castle EPs next romantic crime caper) and The Catch (Shondaland’s take on the sub-genre)—failed to take off. By the turn of the decade, crime shows that focused specifically on the relationship between the two leads had mostly disappeared from the lineup in favor of straight-forward procedurals and ensemble series with auxiliary romances.

But the recent revitalization of network TV has brought a newfound interest in classic, beloved broadcast staples. Following the revival of the network sitcom, two new shows suggest a promising return for network TV’s romantic crime series in the form of ABC’s The Company You Keep and CBS’s True Lies.

Julia Cohen, the co-showrunner of The Company You Keep, chalks everything up to the zeitgeist of our current era. She began work on the series, which is based on the Korean format My Fellow Citizens!, in late 2020 and pitched it at the beginning of 2021 in the thick of the pandemic.

“I really kind of created the show that I was craving,” she told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed in a joint interview with co-showrunner Phil Klemmer. “We’d all been stuck at home for not quite a year and, as I told everyone in the pitch, I’m a romantic at heart. But the idea of sort of a high stakes romance, something that felt truly escapist and inspirational and sort of unabashedly wildly romantic… I think that was just what I was craving in that moment.”

The series follows a conman (Milo Ventimiglia) and a CIA agent (Catherine Haena Kim) who meet in a bar and spend 36 hours together falling in love without disclosing their respective, conflicting career paths. The duo balance their romantic relationship as their professional lives and respective complicated families become increasingly entangled. The show contains all of the essential ingredients of its predecessors: crackling chemistry, fun supporting characters, a high-stakes procedural background to hinge the romanticism on.

True Lies, which is inspired by the James Cameron movie of the same name, is similar in its romantic crime rhythms. The show tracks a married spy (Steve Howey) who hides his secret life from his family in order to protect them. When his wife (Ginger Gonzaga) discovers his double life, she is recruited by his intelligence agency and the duo fight crime together. Although the series was a long time in the making, True Lies showrunner Matt Nix had a similar theory as to why this type of show might be most appealing at this moment in TV time.

“I think one sort of obvious argument is there’s a lot of heavy stuff going on in the world right now,” Nix said in a separate interview. “An escapist romantic world where the good guys generally win and people care about each other and have fun doing their jobs and work through relatable problems [and] actually resolve them… that’s, I think, comforting in a time of massive insecurity.”

“At the same time, personally, I don’t think the audience ever fell out of love with this kind of story,” Nix added. “I think that Hollywood fell out of love with this kind of story.”

He noted that people were still watching similar shows in syndication and on streaming services, so there wasn’t a lack of interest on the part of viewership. There was an emphasis placed on creating shows that felt “weighty and challenging” for a time, he said, and while he thinks that that’s important, there’s also merit in other types of television.

“I do feel like there was a period where grittiness or edginess was synonymous with quality,” said Klemmer. “You couldn’t be fun or frothy or any of these other things without there being some kind of pejorative sense to it.”

With The Company You Keep, Klemmer and Cohen wanted to make an update to the standard network formula and intentionally chose to break some of the preconceived “rules” of the genre.

“And so, a lot of our story breaking was driven [by] what hasn’t been done?” Klemmer said. “How can you push the envelope on network, which is considered a conservative genre, but it doesn’t have to be?”

The series bucks the will-they/won’t-they tropes of romantic crime series past and instead focuses on two people who become romantically entangled within the first episode. There’s no ambiguity or slow-burn tease about the nature of their relationship. The show is decidedly, immediately overt in its sexiness and intentions.

“This is going to be kind of a bit of a steady state love story,” Klemmer said. “It’s not Mulder-Scully, where it’s like just simmering slowly for seven seasons. We can kind of turn the temperature up and down on these two in a way that is really interesting.”

True Lies, too, upends some of the traditional beats of the romantic crime formula. The series opens with a couple who are already together and opts to focus on everyday dilemmas of a middle-aged married couple who are raising teen children and attempting to rekindle some of their spark. Nix said that he wanted to include problems that everyone has dealt with or could at least imagine themselves having, even if the high stakes action is a rarity in most people’s lives.

Ultimately, a traditional broadcast model has proven to be an asset, according to Cohen. A weekly rollout allows viewers to sit with the characters and let their stories “percolate” as they wait for the next episode to drop. “I think anticipation, much like romance, is half the battle,” she said. “So in that regard, I think network TV is exactly the right home for the show.”

“That’s the great thing about working in network now, is that it’s gotten a second lease on life,” Klemmer said. “And we do have partners in our network and studio who are just like, nobody’s saying no because nobody knows what the rules are anymore. And that’s a scary thing, but it can also be liberating and exciting as well.”

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