TV REVIEW : ‘Skeletons’: Average Potboiler

Racism and child molestation are the twin evils driving NBC’s Southern-set murder mystery “Carolina Skeletons� (at 9 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39), which has enough South Carolina atmosphere but not enough skeletons in the closet to quite justify the viewing time involved.

The gumshoe here is Lou Gossett Jr., a Marine officer on leave from Vietnam in 1967 who returns to his childhood home for one last visit with mom. Her dying request: Clear the name of his brother, who--three decades earlier, at the tender age of 14--was sent to the electric chair for the rape/murders of two white girls, acts he couldn’t possibly have committed.

Gossett gets help from Bruce Dern, the sheriff whose father wore the badge at the time of the crimes. (G. D. Spradlin plays the elder lawman, both in flashback and in old-age makeup.) They question some suspicious local old-timers, who tend, of course, to subsequently turn up dead.

Director John Erman does a nice job of setting up the small-town tension of the barely-post-civil-rights era that Gossett boldly strides into. It feels at times like a saner, less hyped-up “Mississippi Burning.� Unfortunately, after an often laconic first hour, Erman and screenwriter Tracy Keenan Wynn start piling on clues and rushing the mystery to its climax, leaving it a decent but typical potboiler.

The best mysteries attempt a forbidden peek into the recesses of the abnormal psyche as well as the requisite plot twists. But the “Skeletons� uncovered in this saga (based on an Edgar Award-winning novel by David Stout, which surely must’ve had a little more complexity to it) feel too generic for such an intriguing setup.