White Collar: The Complete Second Season

In case anyone forgot, one of the dominant threads throughout J.J. Abrams' Alias was 15th Century inventor Milo Rambaldi, whose many inventions involving protein threads, star chart clocks, many manuscripts, an orb and even a giant red ball that made fingernails bleed kept the periphery mystery of the show alive. The folks over at White Collar thought this was a pretty kick-ass idea, taking the music box artefact and literally replicating it ― save for some artistic liberties involving cherub keys ― all the way down to the symbolic, potentially algorithmic series of musical notes within that lead to a greater mystery. Said music box was central to the climax of the season one finale, when ex-thief turned FBI aid Neal Caffrey (Matt Bomer) betrayed the trust of banter buddy/FBI agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) in an effort to steal it. Of course, that blew up in their faces, literally ― there was a big plane explosion ― leading to the reunified crime fighting team in season two battling art forgers, bank robbers and even the nefarious Fowler (Noah Emmerich), who reveals collusion with an unnamed higher up in the FBI. Tiffani Thiessen is all but absent from season two, spending most of it pregnant and on dreadfully rendered green screens to hide this fact, but Bomer compensates with his dead eyes and creepy Patrick Bateman charm, breaking into corporate towers and dismantling elevator panels with MacGyver-like vigour. It's all really cheap, cribbed from a variety of amusingly executed '80s night time soaps, right down to the supposed Intel on the world of white-collar crime, which is so far removed from reality that it's downright laughable. That said, Bomer and DeKay wear really nice suits and every once in awhile there's a chase scene up a flight of stairs leading to idle threats. But, really, when the villains are all pudgy, middle-aged tax evaders and criminology professors, what sort of peril and action do you expect? Included with the four-disc DVD set are a couple of really dry, almost indecipherable commentary tracks, along with a Burn Notice roast and an "anatomy of an episode" supplement that talks about shooting on location in NYC.