Samantha "Sam" Waters, a beautiful psychic detective, works for a quasi-independent unit, the Violent Crimes Task Force, using her incredibly sharp mind and analytical skill to piece together clues to violent crimes in cooperation with the FBI. While she performs all of her duties dilligently, her real motive lies in tragedy - years earlier her husband was slaughtered by a killer known only as Jack Of All Trades, and Sam and her mentor, Bailey Malone, are driven to find and arrest once and for all the one man whose existence reduces Sam to helpless tears at the memory of his brutality.

Throughout the series the producers used stylized visual sequences to illustrate Sam's intuitive leaps. Because the show debuted at the same time as the similarly themed "Millennium" (1996/I), which stared a profiler with actual psychic abilities illustrated with similar stylized segments, many assumed that Sam was supposed to be psychic. In reality the flashes were never supposed to be psychic. Instead they were supposed to illustrate Sam's though process as she made intuitive leaps.

John Grant:
Me, me, me. The guy needs to learn a new pronoun.