For TV’s Newest Crime Fighter, the Lips May Lie, but the Face Tells the Truth

During the past decade, Fox has rarely been the place to go looking for the lessons in collectivism manifest on series like “The Unit” and “Lost” and “Law & Order,” all of which pay tribute to collaborative problem-solving on networks not owned by Rupert Murdoch. Fox doesn’t smell like team spirit. It is a Randian territory of lone saviors (Jack Bauer, John Connor, Gregory House) bushwhacking through impending catastrophe with the weaponry of a singular genius.

The latest addition to the stable is the human polygraph Dr. Cal Lightman (Tim Roth). His gift is determining the criminality of white supremacists, wayward teenagers, Congressional ethics committee chairmen and any and all dubious-seeming Homo sapiens on the basis of shifting body language — “micro-expressions” — which has the effect of turning him into a one-man F.B.I.-municipal police force-Department of Homeland Security on the new series “Lie to Me” (beginning Wednesday).

In addition to his law enforcement efforts, Lightman appears to be a hot ticket on the lecture circuit, where he offers a delicious flashback pageant of public impropriety and heinous misconduct, producing PowerPoint images of Kato Kaelin, O. J. Simpson, Eliot Spitzer, Saddam Hussein, whose sneers and sniggers and pursed lips he has studied like a rabbinical student hunkering down with the Book of Job.

Lightman himself is a fruit basket of stereotype — cocky, infallible, petulant, divorced, burdened by his proficiencies — who has spent decades reading faces and pronouncing certainties: “If your suspect is surprised for more than one second, he is faking it.” The show further embeds the network’s individualist ideologies with a view that suggests private industry can always go the government suits one better. No line item for the Office of Management and Budget, Lightman operates under the auspices of his own consulting firm, the Washington-based Lightman Group, which the feds reluctantly seek out when they are tripped up, presumably by their own inexorable incompetence.

The government minions forced to deal with Lightman on the ground swallow the idea like children forced to take castor oil. “Personally, I think what you do is a joke,” one of them lets him know. But Lightman has his own minions, and thus his own devotees, the people who work for him in his all-white-and-steel, airy-truth-palace of an office. Chief among them is Gillian Foster (Kelli Williams), a behavioral analyst saddled with the task of speaking in earnest exposition and made not to drink Lightman’s Kool-Aid so much as gulp it from the tap.

“Lie to Me” is an invitation to follow her lead, and in some sense it isn’t all that easy to decline the offer. There is an appealing cheekiness to the show’s insistence on dressing up hunch work as the purview of serious science. And there is some legitimacy to the claim: the series is based on the research of Paul Ekman, a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, who is a specialist in nonverbal communication and what his publishers call deception strategies.

Nancy Drew was pretty good at breaking down deception strategies, too. So was Reese Witherspoon in “Legally Blonde.” Throughout the history of modern popular culture we’ve gone in and out of defining female intelligence in terms of intuitive displays. I’m not sure what it means that television’s reigning intuitionists are now male (Lightman joins the strike force of Adrian Monk and “The Mentalist’s” Patrick Jane). And I’m not sure whether the regendering is a democratizing net positive for feminism or whether we should take offense that women’s intuition translates somewhere along the spectrum of cute while its male counterpart is meant to suggest the power of a mind brilliantly deducing.

Against my better judgment, I suspect I’ll keep watching “Lie to Me” until I figure it out.

LIE TO ME

Fox, Wednesday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Created and written by Samuel Baum; directed by Robert Schwentke; Brian Grazer, David Nevins, Steven Maeda and Mr. Baum, executive producers; Dustin Thomason, co-executive producer; Tom Szentgyorgyi, consulting producer; Josh Singer, supervising producer. Produced by Imagine Television in association with 20th Century Fox Television.

WITH: Tim Roth (Dr. Cal Lightman), Kelli Williams (Dr. Gillian Foster), Monica Raymund (Ria Torres) and Brendan Hines (Eli Loker).