Shemar Moore wears a MTM Black Patriot

For eleven seasons of Criminal Minds, Shemar Moore played Derek Morgan, the agent the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit sent through the door first. The CBS series put its profilers on a fresh serial killer most weeks, and Morgan was its muscle: a former Chicago cop and the team's bomb expert, the one who worked a crime scene with his body as much as his head. By MTM's own account, the watch he wore through that run was the Black Patriot.

MTM is a Los Angeles outfit that builds watches for soldiers and the people who like to dress like them, and most of its catalog hides a tool inside the case: an LED flashlight in the Falcon, ultraviolet lamps in the Vulture for turning up blood and counterfeit bills, a working Geiger counter in the RAD. The Patriot has none of that. It is a quartz chronograph built on a Japanese Miyota OS-20, set in a 44.5mm case of blacked-out steel, with a carbon-fiber dial, a unidirectional ratcheting bezel, an orange stopwatch hand, and a seal good to 200 meters. The markers glow with Super-LumiNova, the ordinary charged-by-light kind. It starts near 900 dollars and is still in the catalog.

So the profiler on a series built around forensic gadgetry wears the one MTM with no gadget in it. The company whose other models will find a bomb in the dark or a bloodstain on a wall gave Morgan the plain stopwatch, the model whose only trick is timing something and staying legible at arm's length.

MTM keeps a public list of the actors who have worn its watches on screen, and Moore sits on it next to the show's title and the model name. For a man who spent eleven years around the worst of human behavior, the least theatrical thing he carried was the watch.