Neil Caffrey can do compound interest in his head, quote Allen Ginsberg, and use the word “existential” without sounding pretentious. He also manages to escape from a high security prison (right out the front door), identify a Canadian $100 bill from a single fiber on the shoulder of his soon-to-be partner FBI agent Peter Burke’s suit, and procure a vintage “Rat Pack” wardrobe (complete with fedora)—all before the first commercial break.
This is a smart guy, and if the pilot’s any indication, White Collar is going to be a smart show.
The list of crime or police shows on television any given night could fill its own review, so it would be hard to make the argument that USA’s new drama series is particularly original (in fact, the premise so far seems almost completely derivative of that 2002 Tom Hanks/Leonardo DiCaprio film Catch Me If You Can)—but that doesn’t mean White Collar isn’t worth watching. In fact, with Psych having finished its fourth season and Monk wrapping up the series of its obsessive-compulsive detective for good in the next few months, Friday-night crime on USA might be a little sparse.
And White Collar seems to depart from most current crimes shows in at least one significant way: there’s less gore, and more Goya.
When was the last time a drama series about FBI agents and escaped criminals opened with a completely bloodless pilot? Caffrey’s a forger, art thief, racketeer, counterfeiter and con man, sure, but he comes across as charming and congenial—“You know I don’t like guns,” he says (meanwhile, viewers tag him as a good guy and a romantic, desperate to see his vanished wife Kate and helping Burke with his own relationship problems). And there’s something almost innocent about a program that has the FBI dealing with potential “international incidents” in Spain and, of all places, Canada.
Instead of a gruesome murder, the central crime in White Collar’s pilot centers on 1944 pressed Spanish parchment and forgery of an 18th-century Spanish painter, with a couple references to Beat poetry and French etymology. (“Neal’s smart,” Agent Burke tells his wife, “You know how much I like smart.”)
USA looks to be hoping that its viewers like smart too—the series title, after all, says about as much about the target audience as the two protagonists.
So if the gimmick of an FBI agent/criminal pair might be a little overused, White Collar still has something unique in more subtle crimes, an intelligent subtext, and a character labeled the “Renaissance Criminal” by a fellow art thief.
With all this, maybe the premise doesn’t have to be something completely new—as Peter Burke said: “Classics never go out of style.”
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Isabela Morales is a History and American Studies student and rabid science fiction fan who blogs at thescattering.wordpress.com 
