WITH all the formulaic police dramas around there is one cliché which each new television series should observe and hang in the office.

The sign would read “You can’t reheat a souffle”.

This means you cannot take a plot, a scenario or characters we have seen ten thousand times before in different incarnations and reheat them and expect people to think it is a new dish.

I had seen the trailer for Instinct a number of times, Sky Living was changing into Sky Witness and it was being highlighted as one of the new shows coming to the small screen.

I duly thought this could be good, it could be interesting but there was only one way to find out. I pressed record and then watched it at my leisure.

The plot surrounds Dr Dylan Reinhart (played by Alan Cumming) an author, psychology professor and former CIA paramilitary officer who joins the NYPD to solve bizarre cases.

The first programme out of the slot was the pilot.

I was not overwhelmed nor under whelmed. It means I will probable watch the first actually episode of the series but it will now stand or fall by its merits.

While Cummings brings pizzazz to the role it is not enough to save it from sinking a little.

The plot of the first saw Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Needham, an NYPD detective needing Reinhart’s help in finding a serial killer who is using Reinhart’s book as inspiration for murder.

The programme moved along quickly but each step was a bit like painting by numbers.

You knew what was coming and it was not clever. The plot tried to appear more complicated than you first thought but then you could see the paper thin inadequacies of it all.

I yearned for more from the show and I think the viewers deserved more but what we got was less.

My initial thought as I watched was this could be another ‘Cracker’.

Not a Cracker of a tv series but Cracker in the same mould as the British tv series starring Robbie Coltrane as Dr Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a criminal psychologist who works with Greater Manchester Police to help them solve cases.

I can definitely say this is no Cracker in both senses of the word.

It is not a patch on Cracker could never hold a candle to that excellent programme.

The gulf between the two is massive. Cracker was and still is a unique tv moment while this is a reheated souffle.