MMA in Primetime

Never once have I thought to myself, “I would like to watch LL Cool J portray a hardened Naval criminal investigator fluent in Arabic solve crimes relating to the Navy and Marine Corps while backed by a wisecracking Chris O’Donnell.”

I am in the minority, however, as “NCIS: Los Angeles” is ranked a healthy number eight in viewers out of the thousands of hours of television available to widening asses each season. For Tuesday’s episode, producers decided to have the needed homicide victim be a regular at a mixed martial arts gym. Why? Because CBS, the show’s network, will be airing live Strikeforce bouts in less than two weeks. This is called “synergy,” which is a nice way of saying corporate executives tell producers what to do under duress of either canceling them or extinguishing a cigar butt in their ear.

(Athletes stuck in episodic television is nothing new: during the heyday of the WWE’s “Saturday Night’s Main Event” NBC specials, Hulk Hogan popped up on “The A-Team.” There are other examples: you can look them up.)

Back to the episode. If you caught mentions of guest appearances by Strikeforce fighters Dan Henderson, Cung Le, Frank Shamrock, Josh Thomson, and Gilbert Melendez, you might be disappointed to learn none had speaking parts -- unless you count Shamrock and Le yelling insults as LL Cool J has a cage fight with a guy who is also an undercover LAPD officer. (J had himself gone undercover as a fighter, telling the gym’s instructor that he “has a ground game” to accompany his striking. For mainstream television’s standards, this is insight no less impressive than Jordan Breen scripting the episode himself.)

The show is your standard police procedural: clues get dropped, pursued, and absorbed until the A-Ha moment. It wasn’t a hackneyed portrayal of MMA, though the gym’s name was a non-subtle “Blood and Guts.” And at least “The A-Team” gave Hulk Hogan something to do.