I can’t say I saw her most recent work on Desperate Housewives. Put that down to my pathological need to avoid Teri Hatcher.

Or am I thinking of Cougar Town’s Courteney Cox? They are both just so darn skinny, whiny and irritating. They may as well be the same person. Come to think of it, has anyone ever seen Hatcher and Cox together on the same show at the same time? Hmmm. But I digress.

Dana Delany has her own show now, having swapped Wisteria Lane for another parade of corpses on Body of Proof (Prime7, 8.30pm Monday).

The latest crime procedural squelched out of the Hollywood sausage machine plays like Silent Witness meets The Mentalist meets House meets Bones meets all 317 varieties of CSI. Plus, it has a little bit of Murder, She Wrote, some lab wit from NCIS and a pinch of Quincy, M.E.

No, it’s not exactly an original. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its charms: namely Delany, who plays Philadelphia medical examiner Megan Hunt, a former neurosurgeon now forced to cut open dead people after a car accident wrecked her health, career and marriage.

Hunt is a gutsy protagonist, smart and driven but with enough flaws to avoid coming off as completely smug. She’s intuitively brilliant at interpreting post-mortem clues but equally adept at ticking off her boss, her colleagues and the cops she’s supposed to help.

Aussie actor Nicholas Bishop works the personal angles as the autopsy ace’s investigator sidekick, an ex-cop who counsels Hunt on relating to the living (including her estranged daughter).

The bits at the end of each episode where our forensic sleuth confronts the suspect and verbally joins the whodunit dots, Angela Lansbury-style, are way too neat.

But Delany, while not quite as sympathetic a heroine as The Good Wife’s Julianna Margulies, gives the otherwise pallid Body of Proof a pulse.

And another thing ...

What’s the deal with Talkin’ ’bout your Generation now showing on Wednesdays? And in the Spicks and Specks timeslot!