Blurring the Hero Line

Perfection is kinda boring.  It's inevitably true that flawed heroes are more interesting than perfect ones.  In fact, perfect heroes, like perfect anythings, are pretty insufferable.  So we shouldn’t be surprised when TV good guys have issues—they make bad decisions in the service of good aims; they engage in self-destructive or hurtful behavior; they break rules and piss people off.  But if we expect our good guys to have problems, how do we know they’re good guys?  We have to be able to trust that they mean well and that, when push comes to shove, they’ll do the right thing even when—especially when—it’s not the easy thing.   That trust is crucial, as it provides the viewer with a tether to your hero’s heroism.  But it also provides TV creators with a challenge:  how to make a flawed hero who we still trust.  It's not an easy line to walk, and shows sometimes push the boundary on purpose to keep us guessing.  They want us to believe that we’re watching good guys, but they also want us to think there’s a genuine risk that when the rubber hits the road, our heroes won’t do the right thing.  And that, in my experience, is asking too much.  You need the trust.  Take it away and you no longer have a good guy, you just have a guy. 

A few shows lately have tried to walk that line.  How are they faring?

Chicago PD (NBC, new.  Law enforcement drama.)

Watched: pilot.

Premise:  The exploits of an intelligence unit in the Chicago police department.

Promise:  I watched this (and summarily abandoned it) a long time ago, but it’s taken me a while to get up the energy to review it.  It’s a spin-off from Chicago Fire, and it has the same mood—what I’d call “soap under fire.”  Emotional and political entanglements and tensions are heightened by the characters’ dangerous and/or urgent surroundings, which is supposed to give everything a more vivid intensity.  I’m not averse to the mood, in principle—ER did it well, years ago, and coincidentally was set in Chicago too.  Perhaps the best of these I can recall, and it was wonderful, was Oz.  But for the format to work, you have to care about the characters, and you need real protagonists to root for and antagonists to root against.  Chicago PD, at least on first watching, didn’thave either of these.  What it had instead was a troubling “enforcement at any cost” law enforcement model, where police are lionized for their moral ambiguity and willingness to cross civil rights boundaries to stop the bad guys.  I’m not saying the bad guys aren’t bad, or shouldn’t be stopped—but over and over, we’re being fed the message that civil and human rights are impediments to justice, rather than crucial elements of it.  That’s deeply, viscerally disturbing.

There’s also a racial dynamic to this show that someone should have caught – a bunch of white cops policing drug crime in black communities.  One of the cops is Hispanic, and there’s an Asian tech officer (sigh) but otherwise it’s a very, very white cast.  I suppose it’s possible that that matches the demographics of Chicago law enforcement, but I want television to better. 

Verdict:  I’d yawn, but I’m too troubled to.

Mind Games (ABC, new.  Heist procedural.)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise:  Two brothers--an ex-con (Christian Slater) and a bipolar former professor (Steve Zahn) start a persuasion firm.

Promise:  Like Lie To Me, Scandal, Leverage, and Hustle, this is a show about a team of smart manipulators who—and this is very fortunate for all of us—use their powers for good rather than ill.  Here, their power is the Jedi Mind Trick:  using various persuasion tactics to create positive outcomes for their clients.  Or to put it differently, they're somewhere between con men, mentalists, and advertisers.  Within the con/heist genre, where the show rests pretty comfortably, the show’s soul is closer to Scandal’s than Leverage’s:  Their clients are, generally speaking, sympathetic and need help, but while our heroes’ methods are more legal than the Leverage team’s, their motives are more morally ambiguous and their methods are more consistently troubling.  In Leverage, they’re all “bad guys” in the sense that they do illegal things, but they’re good guys—that is, we trust them implicitly—because they have good hearts and aren’t willing to hurt each other.  In Mind Games, like Scandal, they’ve spent so much time dancing on the trust line that they may not know when they cross it.  That puts a lot of weight on the show’s “conscience” characters, who on one hand are the “us” of the cast, but on the other hand can very easily seem like harping nags.   That said, each episode involves the team cleverly surmounting what seem like impossible odds, and we care about the outcome as well as the characters’ moral health and potential for redemption.  I’d just like to see the groundwork for a little more trust.  (Not to mention some plot attention to the show’s supporting characters, although I presume that’ll come later.)

Finally, two unrelated observations emerge from the first two episodes:

(1) Steve Zahn is great as the naive, bipolar brother, although we’ve really only seen him in a manic phase.  I honestly don’t know if I want to see him be that good in a depressed phase.

(2)  Jazz flute is the universal soundtrack to con games.

Verdict:  I love watching them be smart and competent, but I don’t particularly like watching them be deceitful to each other.  I’ll keep watching until I figure out which they do more of, or until I get bored, whichever comes first.

 

Those Who Kill (A&E, new.  Law enforcement procedural.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Obsessive Pittsburgh detective and mercurial civilian profiler play cat- and mouse- with serial killers. 

Promise:  This show is adapted from the Danish, and is just as moody as (although less atmospheric than) its fellow Dane, The Killing.  Like The Killing, it centers on a woman who’s trying to overcome the darkness in her own soul and the difficulty of her past by stopping the bad guys—but not necessarily by making the world a better or happier place.  It reminds me a lot of Homeland—Chloe Sevigny’s character is the one person dedicated (and crazy) enough to pursue this bad guys in her self-destructive, obsessive way.  It’s moody and glum and bleak and although the heroine is a deeply competent investigator, she’s not really someone you’d want to hang out with. She's interesting enough, but not necessarily fun enough to watch.

I’m also a bit tired of watching shows about women whose heroism is borne of victimhood.  Lots of heroes are, of course, driven by trauma.  Batman, anyone?  But it occurred to me as I was watching this show that when women are trauma-driven heroes, it’s generally about a trauma that happened to them—whereas when men are trauma-driven heroes, it’s generally about a trauma that happened to someone else, someone they couldn’t save (and in fact often a woman or a child).  There may well be female heroes out there who are motivated by some trauma that happened to someone else, rather than to themselves…but none come to mind right now.  And that means our heroines are, automatically, also victims and revengers.  Can’t they be just heroes?  

Verdict:  I may give it another episode or two, or I may wander off.   

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  The Assets, Under the Gunn, Star-Crossed, The Red Road.