‘Motive’ season 2, episode 2 review: Jennifer Beals and a ‘break-in’

When you look at what is classified as “summer TV,” so much of it has a few things in common: A myriad of mysteries. There are so many crime shows on in the summer proportional to other things that it is hard to keep track.

With that being said, we still enjoy “Motive,” which we suppose is barely a summer show since its episodes aired in Canada months ago. It’s a show that has many of the crime TV staples, but with just enough of a twist to make things stand out.

Obviously to us, the reason this show works is in the title: It’s not just another stereotypical mystery show where you are struggling to figure out who killed someone. You get that information at the start of the episode. This is all about the how and why, and trying to figure out all of the personal stories that are behind the crimes. This one was pretty fantastic, thanks mostly to the presence of Jennifer Beals front and center of it. The motive was actually an interesting one here: Trying to stop a dealer from continuing to damage the life of her addict son.

The only thing that we don’t understand? Using a shotgun as a murder weapon, since it is obviously not something that you would carry around on a regular basis. Obviously, this was what was supposedly in the place already to make this look like self-defense, but how many people have a shotgun?

This is just a minor quibble, though, in a story that still feels fresh compared to most murder-mysteries out there. Maybe “Motive” hasn’t been on the air long enough to be stale, or maybe it just has a different set of skills in the writers room to keep it interesting. Grade: B.

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Photo: ABC