Procedural Dos and Don'ts

Ah, the weekend. Time to catch up on some television.  And to write some longer-than-usual reviews about this season's new procedurals, both from NBC...

The Blacklist (NBC, new.  Spy procedural.)

Watched:  First three episodes

Premise:  One of America’s most wanted criminals helps/manipulates the FBI into tracking and neutralizing  a “blacklist” of his, and presumably the country’s, worst enemies.

Promise:  I describe it above as a spy procedural, since that’s what it most closely resembles, but one of this show’s great strengths is it straddles categories.  The characters have a large mystery arc that will, I expect, unfold as the season progresses.  While that happens, they address criminal dangers using unconventional methods, a la Person of Interest or Nikita. 

The show seems custom-made for James Spader, and it’s at its best when Spader’s character (Red) is being clever.  Fortunately, there’s a lot of that.  As the story unfolds, I expect we’ll find out more about what Red is really after, and why he’s chosen this particular method of obtaining it.  But unlike Hostages, where the lack of information makes it hard to care about the stakes, here the lack of information—and the promise of information to come—adds intrigue.  What makes the shows different?  Spader’s finesse is part of it, but only part.  The main thing, I think, is that is that at its heart, this show pumps the blood of a procedural.  Each episode promises to generate some form of success—such as catching a criminal—whereas Hostages is set up so that the best we can ever expect is preventing, but more likely delaying, some form of disaster.  That means that even if we never find out all the secrets, there’s something to grab on to, and frankly I think I’d enjoy it even if we weren’t promised the answers to everything.  Also, where Hostages strives for gritty verisimilitude, this show is more explicitly a fantasy. What I mean by that is that, although this is billed as a law-enforcement show, it relies as much on spy tropes as police tropes.  In doing so, it builds on believable elements to create a story that feels real, with characters whose emotions feel real—but it never expects us to believe that the characters’ abilities are bounded by ordinary human limitations.  That means we can care about them without having to worry about them so much.

Overall, these characters are well-constructed.  Red is a delicate mixture of competence and guile, and the FBI agent he insists on working with has depth and intelligence.  Their rapport is growing, and as it does, I hope they highlight more of the FBI agent’s strengths, of which she has many, rather than her uncertainties.  The main characters appear to share common mysteries, which makes them all the more interesting.  The supporting characters have enough sparkle to support without being distracting.  The plots generally rely on an uncanny combination of skill and coincidence, which makes them dramatic and fun (if not realistic), and the show’s structure implies an overarching set of connections that we can look forward to.

Verdict:  Intriguing characters and a reliable story generator make this a very strong start and lots of promise for continued interest.  I’d recommend finding the pilot on Hulu rather than jumping in midstream, but otherwise it’s not so serialized that one must catch every episode in order.

Ironside (NBC, new.  Law enforcement procedural.)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise: Wheelchair-bound police officer solves crimes with the help of his hand-picked team.

Promise: Remaking a classic is risky.  Sometimes it works (Hawaii 5-0); sometimes it doesn’t (Prime Suspect). To my taste, this one doesn’t.  I’m a big fan of crime procedurals for a lot of reasons.  One of those reasons is how comforting they are:  They show us that as bad as the world is, some bad things can be fixed in an hour.  This show takes that premise to such an extreme—showing us such a terrible world—that the things this team fixes feel like a tiny drop in the grim-world bucket.  That undermines the comforting nature of the form.  It’s not an automatic show-killer, but at least for my taste, it’s something the show needs to get past in order to be enjoyable.  So is the fact that these law enforcement officers consistently treat rules as impediments, and justifying their massive civil rights violations with “results.”  It’s a particular peeve of mine:  law enforcement is all about succeeding within the rules, not about subverting them.  Again, not a fatal problem—Hawaii 5-0 is among the many shows that have figured out how to tell entertaining stories about people who consistently break the rules they’ve pledged to uphold—but it’s another one to overcome.   And this show doesn’t get past either problem.  It strives so hard for “gritty” that it crosses over into “humorless” and “angry” pretty fast.  It relies on a trope that I find deeply tiresome:  the cop so angry at the injustice of the world that he can’t control himself physically, and ends up sweeping things off tables and yelling at suspects.  Yawn.  I like the variation in main characters—in addition to Ironside himself, the other detectives on his team are a young woman with mob connections and poor impulse control, a former investment banker, and a tactless, angry young man.  Between the three of them, they have a variety of information sources and analytical skills, which makes them a good team.  But for all their skills, they have very little rapport.  So it would need a pretty strong show to make me want to watch while they figure out their chemistry.  This one doesn’t rise to the occasion. 

Verdict: I wanted to like it more than I do.  It’s a functioning procedural, which may be enough for some, but for my taste, but the mood is so glum that it isn’t much fun to watch.

 On the DVR:  Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, Lucky 7 (canceled), Masters of Sex, Betrayal, Hello Ladies, Super Fun Night, Sean Saves the World, The Originals, The Tomorrow People, Witches of East End, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland.  Wow, when I look at them all laid out like that, I sure have a lot of supernatural drama to watch.