As usual Hollywood can't come up with a new idea so they rob the vault of an old one. Here Blair Underwood takes over the iconic role of the crime sleuth Ironside originally played by Raymond Burr back in the day.
The show opens on a dark night. A frumpy guy named Lucas is manhandled into the backseat of a car. He is soon joined by Detective Robert Ironside, meaning the manhandling was done by the police and in the Real World would mean a lawsuit but this isn't the Real World.
Despite being paralyzed from the waist down, Ironside shows he's far from helpless as he smacks Lucas around (Lawsuit! Lawsuit!) while demanding to know the whereabouts of a missing 10-year-old girl. Lucas weakly threatens the cop with a knife. Ironside simply takes the knife away, smacks Lucas some more, then kindly returns the weapon. Where's the girl? Lucas starts to cry and mutters "RST317" over and over.
By now the rest of Ironside's crew show up. Ironside recognizes what Lucas is saying is a license plate number and orders his crew to start searching the other cars in the parking lot. While they're off doing that, Ironside's superior, Ed, comes over to the car to give the required "You need to stop being a lone wolf and playing by your own rules" speech. Ironside's answer to that is the discovery of the missing girl, alive, in a car's trunk.
Now to our main mystery. A beautiful and successful woman is found dead on the sidewalk in front of her office building. Did she jump or was she pushed? Only Ironside and his team can find out.
The dead woman is Annie Ryan. She worked for Mullen Financial. The company had been throwing a party last night to celebrate a big deal. No one noticed Annie was missing/dead until this morning. Ironside starts asking Annie's boss, Bill Broughton, about his employee. Who were her friends? Who was she having sex with? Was it you, Bill?
Next Detective Ironside goes to search Annie's desk. He finds an application for the New York Marathon, lots of pictures of Annie with her sister Rachel, and a locket with pictures inside of her and sis when they were little girls. Ironside takes the locket with him because that's totally not unethical or illegal.
Ironside sends two of his guys to search Annie's apartment. Virgil is the cop who manhandled Lucas from the beginning. Virgil is aggressive and also plays by his own rules. This probably stems from him being named Virgil. Teddy is a former investment banker turned cop, because investment bankers and cops are practically the same thing, right? Right.
While searching-slash-trashing the apartment, the cops discover some financial files from her office as well as pornographic pictures of her with other people. Holly, the only female on Ironside's team and his right hand woman, shows the pictures to a helpful pimp. He explains these pictures are from what are called "flower parties" (back in my day we called them "orgies") and points Holly in the direction of Albanian gangsters.
The next person to be questioned is Amanda Rousch. She was training Annie for the marathon and mentions her client's boyfriend, Zamir Kraji, was a pretty tough character. (As the cops are leaving, Amanda has sort of a smile on her face. The show never does explain this. She just found out Annie was dead. Why is she smiling?)
Teddy and Virgil go to question Zamir, an Albanian immigrant with a rap sheet. When the cops illegally enter the apartment it is to find Zamir (fighting so hard not to type Zamfir) on the couch. There's one of the racy pictures of Annie pinned to his chest... with a butcher knife. The coroner later reports Zamir has been dead at least three days, meaning he died before Annie's fall.
However Zamir's killer left all sorts of prints and DNA at the crime scene and the cops easily track down Zamir's cousin, Alek Carcani. They've got him for Zamir but Alek won't say anything about Annie.
Ironside goes back to question Bill Broughton again. The detective theorizes it was Bill who sent Annie to all those "flower parties" to keep the company's rich customers happy. Bill won't say anything.
Ironside is working out at his apartment when he has a breakthrough. He calls his team for a brainstorming. They figure Annie and Zamir hooked up at one of these sex parties. Annie convinced Zamir to let her launder his drug money through her company. Part of this money was Alek's but he had been left out of the loop. Annie did a terrible job of laundering and lost half the money. Alek found out what Annie and his cousin had done and he was very, very pissed. Pissed enough to kill.
The brainstorming is interrupted when the team receives word that Rachel, Annie's sister, has taken Bill Broughton hostage. Ironside and Holly go over to try and talk Rachel out of doing anything stupid. When they fail, Ironside orders Holly to shoot Broughton in the leg. When Broughton falls, this allows the other cops to move in and safely disarm Rachel.
Broughton was only nicked by the bullet and has been brought in to be questioned. Ironside figures that it was Broughton who discovered the Albanian's account Annie was handling. Bill was able to break into it and he was the one who stole half the assets. In order to keep the spotlight off of him, Bill gave the racy pictures of Annie to Alek and told the gangster what she and Zamir had done with Alek's money. Ironside suggests Broughton confess to money laundering so he can have a couple of safe years in prison away from the vengeful and murderous Alek.
As for Annie...
Turns out it was a suicide after all. She found her dead boyfriend in his apartment and carried away all the dirty photos of her (except for the one pinned to his chest by the butcher knife). The pressure got to her and Annie cracked. Not wanting to sully the memory of her sister, Annie took off her locket and left it on her desk before going up to the roof and jumping.
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