In case it's not clear from her slouch or her frown or the way she rolls her eyes and sneers savagely at anything related to puppies, sunshine or apple pie, Mary Shannon is a cynic. An unrepentant, first-class, Grade-A, life's-a-big-pain-in-the-keister kind of cynic, with an attitude so roiling, hissing and steaming with flammable bile that she sets off smoke alarms.
Even if you missed all those signals, though, you'd still know that Shannon, the marvelously misanthropic federal marshal played by Mary McCormack in the USA Network series "In Plain Sight," is a dark, troubled soul. You'd know because she regularly employs an old-fashioned, low-tech method of tipping you off: She tells you so.
"In Plain Sight," like many current TV series, uses a narrative technique known as the voice-over. There's nothing new about voice-overs -- some viewers will recall series such as "The Waltons" (1972-81), "Harry O" (1974-75) and "The Wonder Years" (1988-93), in which lead characters constantly think out loud -- but the technique has come and gone over the years, like a screenwriter's version of hem lengths and tie widths.
Right now, we're in a Golden Age of Voice-Overs. Not only because many shows use them, but also because they're being used with more artistry, eloquence and flair than ever before, to set moods and tones, to deepen and sharpen characterizations, to mystify and beguile as well as to explain and elucidate. The voice-over is now a distinctive -- even crucial -- feature in many popular series.
Just as a first-person narrator can invigorate a work of literature -- think of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, Herman Melville's Ishmael, Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman -- and just as the soliloquy did wonders for a certain prince named Hamlet, so, too, can a voice-over in a TV show do more than just nudge the plot along.
Admittedly, in some authorial hands, the voice-over is a lazy shortcut, an easy way to explain what's going on or to get a cheap laugh. But the writers of current series such as "In Plain Sight," "Burn Notice," "Desperate Housewives," "Grey's Anatomy" and "Dexter," and departed series that live on in motion pictures such as "Sex and the City" (1998-2004), use the voice-over as a dazzling creative device, fit for far more than mere exposition.
Without the voice-over, "In Plain Sight's" acerbic Shannon, who helps relocate witnesses in federal cases for their protection, would be hard to take.
In "Burn Notice," the voice-over by Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) is informational and whimsical, functioning as a sort of textbook for spies: "Spies spend a lot of time traveling," he noted in a recent episode, as his colleagues prepare to swipe documents at a morgue in the Bahamas, "but they don't usually end up in the most desirable locations."
