Body of Proof review

I used to love Dana Delaney on "China Beach." She was real. She could act. That was the last time she bothered, apparently. Now all she wants to do is to walk through the motions of being the most idiotic medical examiner ever. Everyone else on the show can act, including the girl who plays her daughter. But here we have the star of the show tromping around clumsily in six-inch heels and just as clumsily delivering her lines.

And the violations of protocol are insulting. You don't go cutting into a dead body with your hair hanging down in the entrails. Contamination of evidence, first of all. Second, why would you want your hair to smell like a dead body? No hair cover, no face mask, nothing. Just Dana with her perfect coif and perfect make-up, teetering over the autopsy table in her stilettos. And amazingly, her patients all manage to heal instantly and perfectly when she has the chance to work on someone living. Her talents are wasted on the dead. We need that miracle worker in an ER or ICU, if not an operating room.

I am willing to suspend disbelief with some types of shows. If I'm watching sci-fi or fantasy, yeah, it's okay if Peter Pan teaches the children how to fly. But a show about a medical examiner, one entitled "Body of Proof"? Nope. Give me realism. Show me how real ME's do their work. Don't just give me an obnoxious idiot and tell me I'm supposed to like and admire her. Not gonna happen. "Crossing Jordan" was more realistic.

And for gosh sake, lose the high heels. No one who does her job standing on her feet all day is going to tolerate that kind of foot pain. Additionally, I'm sure body fluids get slopped over the edge of the autopsy table. If you spent several hundred dollars on a pair of designer heels, would you want to scrub rotting guts off them at the end of the day?

And she doesn't worry about contamination of evidence in the least. If the cops tell her not to do something, she does it just to be an ass. Don't turn the body. So she turns the body. Don't follow the bad guy into the spooky building. Into the spooky building she goes, unable to run from danger in her idiotic stiletto heels. She never thinks to use the dang shoes for the only thing they are good for--weapons. She could easily subdue a vicious criminal with a well-placed pointed toe or spiked heel, but instead, she grasps around to find something else to use, like a scalpel conveniently left nearby.

Obviously, there was a reason I gave up watching this show the first season. We gave it another try last night, only to find it had gotten worse, not better. Kick her off (and get rid of the writers while you are at it) and let it be an ensemble cast with the rest of the people on the show, all of whom are better actors, more interesting, and more enjoyable than poor Dana. I hope you still have royalties coming in from "China Beach," Dana. It wouldn't hurt to go back and watch a few of those shows and try to remember what it was that you used to do that made you a good, believable character on a medical show.