Making Something New

I believe I’ve written here before about how I think we live in an unprecedented time for procedurals and longer-form television mysteries.  Because the forms are so well developed, viewers know the conventions of the form, and shows can take shortcuts and experiment with subverting the form.  This formal familiarity makes sub-genres like the banter procedural and the character-driven procedural possible:  because we already know what to expect from the procedure, the show can skip the track-laying and use that extra time to do other things. 

Today’s group of procedurals and mysteries (not the whole crop for the season; there are too many!) take very different approaches to this invitation to do “something new” within their respective forms.  Legends takes two very well-developed forms (undercover law enforcement procedural and spy/conspiracy drama) and marries them with each other, creating a result that feels newer than its familiar formal origins would predict.  Stalker sets up its male lead as a perpetrator of exactly the sort of crime he’s meant to combat—and as my review below demonstrates, I’m really conflicted about whether it works or not.   Gracepoint doesn’t do anything new at all—it’s a carbon copy of its UK source material—but its source, Broadchurch, freshens the long-form mystery form (Prime Suspect, The Killing) by adding a sense of personal connection between one of the investigators and the small town where it takes place, and making its male lead a sort of mystery in himself.  And NCIS: New Orleans doesn’t even try.  The NCIS formula runs on rails; it just puts a new train on those tracks.

NCIS: New Orleans (CBS, new.  Law enforcement procedural.)

Watched: pilot

Premise: A forensic team in New Orleans investigates Navy-related crime.

Promise:  This is a cookie-cutter procedural, with some Cajun spice tossed around, by which I mean the lead investigator (Scott Bakula) plays jazz and cooks regional food.  It has the regular CBS-procedural mix of forensic crime solving and interpersonal banter, and as per formula, the characters are archetypes with quirks that collectively make the procedural team tick.  The show relies heavily on the idea that a team of this sort should bond together and becomes a family, and I often enjoy watching that sort of family-like professional dynamic.  ZoeMcLellan as “the new girl” and CCH Pounder as “the experienced medical examiner” bring lively personalities to the table.  We feel like we already know everyone from the first few moments, because we do—they’re exactly the people who populate this sort of show.

I found it somewhat odd that a predominantly white team is working in this predominantly African-American city, although the demographic imbalance wasn’t as troubling as the pilot’s heavy reliance on the tired “white person saves at-risk black kid” trope and associated stereotypes about black youth and gangs.  It took a story that could be about the struggles of a young person facing hard odds and turned it into a story about the white man that “saved” him.   In the end, though, my decision not to add the show to my “continue watching” queue wasn’t about anything particularly objectionable—in fact, there are plenty of things I would probably enjoy about the show as its chosen-family dynamic grows—but rather, about the feeling that if I missed some episodes, I wouldn’t miss anything I couldn’t predict. It’s as if the show already knows it’s just painting by numbers. 

Verdict:  A totally serviceable forensic procedural that I won’t watch much of.

Legends (TNT, summer 2014.  Conspiracy/suspense drama.)

Watched:  whole first season

Premise:  An FBI undercover specialist struggles to find himself amid his sea of personal histories.

Promise:  Based on advertising for the show, I had assumed it was a procedural about an undercover cop.  I was wrong:  although there are elements of that, it’s much more of a spy show than a law enforcement show, and it focuses far more on a deeper conspiracy than on particular crimes.  In essence, the main character (played by Sean Bean) is the mystery; the core questions of the series revolve around uncovering his own personal history, which even he does not know.   There wasn’t anything terribly original about the undercover work or the conspiracy, but there was something about the combination of the two that felt compelling, and I found myself swept along into it, wanting to know the secrets just as our hero did.  It reminded me of stories about spy types trying to find their place in the world and identify the right targets for their righteous vengeance, like Hunted or LaFemme Nikita, but with a male lead.  (And I will say, there’s something oddly refreshing about a show where a man is initially stripped of identity and personhood, for a change.  Don’t get me wrong:  I enjoy shows about powerful women reclaiming their selfhood, but each of them starts, by necessity, with a woman who’s been hollowed out.  This one isn’t the first to begin with a hollow man, but it’s the first one I can recall in a while.)

Bean’s character is one of these gritty justice-at-any-cost types, which often bothers me with law enforcement shows, but this had enough of a spy fantasy mood that it just washed over me.    I could express my annoyance at the “undercover handler has to go undercover herself as a stripper” trope, or the use of female sexuality as a lever of persuasion throughout the plot, but I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the totally competent and likeable female hacker (played by Tina Majorino, hooray) and a couple of other very capable women who I won’t go into detail about for spoiler reasons.  So my main critiques have to do with the shallow treatment of the supporting cast, all of whom get glimmers of much more interesting personal histories of their own, but never get to shine in their own rights.  

Verdict:  Not exactly high art, but an enjoyable enough conspiracy puzzle to sweep me along.

Gracepoint (Fox, new-to-U.S. Long-form mystery.)

Watched: first four episodes

Premise:  Police and the community respond when a boy is found dead on the beach in a small town.

Promise:  It’s a bit hard for me to review this, because it’s almost a shot for shot remake of the BBC’s Broadchurch, which I found to be amazing: a taut, twisty, emotionally wrenching tour de force.  This is exactly the same, yet not quite the same (even down to David Tennant playing the male lead in both, but with an American accent this time), which puts it in an uncanny valley of sorts.  I have no idea whether it’ll end in the same way as the British version.  If it does, it’ll be disappointingly repetitious for those of us who have seen it before.  If it doesn’t, it’ll be an interesting storytelling experiment in how the same setup can lead to a different outcome.  Overall, I can repeat my original review of Broadchurch:  “it has much in common with The Killing: it’s a long-form mystery that more broadly explores the interrelated stories of the people influenced by it – the police detectives, the victim’s family, journalists covering the crime, and the other residents of the small town where it takes place . . . Few characters are either wholly likeable or wholly not; the result is that they are all interesting, or at least potentially so, but also sometimes we’re angry with them and sometimes we root for them, the way we would for real people.”

As for the adaptation, I am pleasantly surprised that some of the emotional beats still hit me in the pilot even though I knew they were coming.  But so far the actors (especially the female lead) seem to have aimed for somewhat more sympathetic performances, which means that the story will have to rely more on sensational aspects and less on the seething undercurrent that made us feel slightly uncomfortable at all times in Broadchurch.  We’ll see whether that makes a big difference in how the show unfolds.

Verdict:  Worth trying if you didn’t watch Broadchurch, and maybe even if you did.  Meanwhile, if you didn’t watch Broadchurch, consider Netflixing that.

Stalker (CBS, new.  Law enforcement procedural.)

Watched: first three episodes

Premise: A unit of the LAPD investigates stalking crimes.

Promise: I have very complicated feelings about this show.  Very complicated.  Complicated enough that I almost made it a whole post of its own, before considering just how many shows are in my backlog.  So please bear with me if this ends up being a longer review than most.  The show has gotten some pretty bad reviews, and has been described as misogynist by multiple reviewers.  I don’t disagree.  The show sensationalizes stalking and all too often embodies the voyeuristic tendencies it purports to condemn.  (Seriously, there are a lot of shots of women disrobing.  It’s troubling.)  

And I could end the review there and walk away, and that would be a fine review.  But I also want to complicate that discussion a bit.  To write the show off as misogynistic and exploitive is to ignore some of the things it actually does very well.  First, and most importantly, it explains and demonstrates just how unsettling, disruptive, and violating stalking is for its victims.  It’s all too easy to write off stalking as a victimless crime, and it’s not.  This show does a pretty good job of demonstrating why not—how victims’ lives can be changed, even permanently so, by the experience of being stalked.  Second, it’s very good at explaining some of the possibly-counterintuitive behaviors of stalking victims.  It’s all too easy to condemn victims for not reporting, for example, but this show demonstrates why they don’t—that reports of stalking can seem subjective or difficult to believe; that stalking victims can (wrongly) believe they are to blame for their stalkers’ behavior; and that stalking victims are afraid of sounding narcissistic, to name a few.  On this show, we hear stalking victims articulate those concerns and we feel sympathy and empathy for them, which is important.  Third, it demonstrates just how difficult stalking can be to investigate.  It’s hard to identify perpetrators whose crime is often all about hiding.  And finally, it demonstrates powerfully how stalking is often a crime rooted in compulsion and lack of empathy, and isn’t about flattery, or love, or any of the other positive descriptors that get tossed around to defend stalking behaviors.  By placing the camera in the eyes of the perpetrators sometimes, it demonstrates just how different the stalker mindset is from the norm.  We don’t feel comfortable watching, and we shouldn’t. 

So the show does a good job of exploding some of the myths about stalking.  And yet.  And yet.  Then it seems to endorse a stalker.  The male lead (played by Dylan McDermott) is a stalker, no two ways about it.  He is an excellent investigator.  He knows he’s flawed, and professes to be serious about self-improvement, while not perfectly embodying his goals.  This makes him interesting.  But for all his talk about self-improvement, he seems not to have any self-awareness about the fact that he is a stalker, stalking his young son in an attempt to reconcile with him.  We know that things are “off” about him—we see various demonstrations that he doesn’t seem to operate with the same sort of empathy that people should have.  So, ok, that makes it seem like he’s a villain, with the same compulsion and lack of empathy as the villains-of-the-week.  And while it’s odd to hide a villain in that lead role, it’s not unprecedented.  Think Dexter.  Except Dexter believes he’s making the world a better place by killing (and may even be, although that's a tougher call); this lead simply doesn’t seem to know that what he’s doing is wrong.  And there’s the problem:  it’s hard to know what the show wants us to think.  Does it want him to succeed?  Somehow I doubt it—I would be very surprised if the show ultimately reconciled him with his son.  But it does seem to want our sympathy for this man.  It implies that he can’t help it, and (worse yet) that it may make him better at investigating stalking crimes.  It’s almost as if we’re supposed to have compassion for the stalkers as well as their victims.  And while I’m usually in favor of more compassion, I think here it undermines many of the good things that the show does.  I’m not necessarily against moral ambiguity—but here, it’s counterproductive unless and until the show stops treating the lead as sympathetic.

The fact that I’ve watched a few episodes of this demonstrates that it’s intriguing, in its way, if for no other reason than the puzzle of figuring out what the show wants us to think about the lead.  What’s most interesting to me is that my characterization of the show is precisely my characterization of the lead:  it is very good at some things, and then does this offensive thing too.  And perhaps that’s the crux of it.  If I’m going to condemn the lead of this show, I should condemn the whole show.  But I can’t completely overlook the sliver of good in each of them.

Verdict:  I really don’t want to see more shows like this one.  But it’s more complicated than just “trash.”

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  Dominion, Tyrant, The Almighty Johnsons, Manhattan, The Knick, Z Nation, Red Band Society, The Mysteries of Laura, Madam Secretary, Gotham, Scoprion, Forever, Survivor's Remorse, The Flash, Transporter, Constantine.

Ill Legal

I tend to avoid watching shows about lawyers, because they make me lose critical distance.  It's personal for me; I just have a lot of difficulty watching them impartially.  Lawyer shows often ignore the fact that the law is an extremely regulated ethical environment, and to the extent that they do portray any of the (intense) ethical obligations of lawyers, they tend to portray lawyers as ethically-challenged, just looking for ways around those obligations.  This fundamentally turns the truth of law practice on its head.  I don’t mean to say that every lawyer is ethical—there are bad apples in every profession, and unethical lawyer stories hit the press every so often—but the very fact that we hear about it when lawyers are unethical highlights the rarity of those ethical breaches.  (In fact, the vast majority of ethical breaches in the law involve desperate, misguided lawyers “borrowing” money from their clients’ accounts, and getting disbarred for it.) 

I absolutely understand why these shows do it—stories about totally normal people doing totally normal things are much harder to make interesting than stories about people walking close to the edges of bad ideas.  So I can’t criticize the shows for doing the same thing to the law that I often enjoy when it happens to other professions in other shows.  House was a terrible example of a doctor. Being a bodyguard probably looks nothing like Human Target, and being a spy probably looks nothing like Covert Affairs.  Solving crime surely doesn’t happen at the pace of TV.  Forensic criminalists surely almost never interrogate witnesses.  But somehow I can enjoy these deviations from the truth, and can't the same thing with law.  Maybe it’s just that, as a legal professional, I’m more sensitive about law.  I’d expect doctors to be just as uncomfortable with House.  But also, I’m concerned that the consistent portrayal of lawyers as ethically-challenged feeds recursively into the way TV viewers actually view the legal profession.  “Lawyer jokes” play on the same false traits that TV often portrays.  And legal ethics—as strict and moral as they are—can genuinely look strange from the outside.  (For example, client confidentiality is a crucial element of law practice, because the system needs clients to trust their lawyers.  But it also means that sometimes lawyers know things that they can’t disclose, which looks strange to non-lawyers.  Likewise, lawyers sometimes have to make alternative arguments—“he didn’t do it, but if he did, it was justified”—that can seem disingenuous from the outside, even though they can be important to the law’s process of finding justice and resolving disputes. )  So my concern is that these consistent portrayals of lawyers as unethical, just like consistent portrayals of gender or race stereotypes, can bleed in and out of public perception just as unfairly as those other stereotypes do.  

So, to sum up, I have trouble watching law shows impartially.

But with that caveat about critical distance, I wanted to watch these three shows because each featured a female protagonist embarking on major personal challenges.  What I found sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't, but sadly brought me right back to the stereotype bin.  Each of the three shows takes radically different approaches to the law, but they have one thing in common:  each portrays its female protagonist as independent, opinionated…and a slave to her emotions and sexuality. 

How to Get Away with Murder (ABC, new. Legal drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Law students assist their professor’s criminal defense clients in ethically unacceptable ways.

Promise:  As a show about law (and especially about law teaching), this is totally offensive.  The law professor encourages her first-year law students to miss meetings other essential courses, rewards them for unethical practices like lying and destroying evidence, and doesn’t actually teach them anything about the law.  In recent years there’s been a move toward “experiential learning” in law school, and there’s a good reason for that:  lawyers learn by doing.  And here, this professor is teaching them to do things directly aimed at separating the students from their moral cores, and that’s appalling. 

But setting aside my feelings about how this show portrays the law and legal education, I have other critiques.  I was hoping to really enjoy another show about a strong woman of color, but I found this portrayal too mired in stereotypes to enjoy it.  The protagonist’s bad decisions in the pilot seem consistently based on irrational emotionality and sexuality, which combine for a heady mix of bad decisions.  For example, she blames her unethical sexual promiscuity on the fact that she and her husband have been talking about having children, which apparently pings some emotional button for her.  The whole show seems tied not only to the “women are irrationally sexual beings” trope but also to another trope that I may do a whole post on, sometime—that women can’t be wholly competent because they just have too many feelings.  And on top of that, she’s mean.  Mean characters can be interesting—House was mean, and I loved watching him—but unlike House, this protagonist doesn’t have a foil.  House works as a character partly because Wilson reminds us that there is something likeable about him, and works as a force to check his crueler impulses.  But this character has such complete control over everyone in her life that there’s nothing to stop her from just seeming evil.

All those things aside, though, this show has much the same juicy stories and team dynamic as Scandal, and juicy teamy stories can be a lot of fun.  So If you like Scandal—and at times, I really have—t’s reasonable to like this.

Verdict:  Problematic in a whole bunch of ways, but not without juicy appeal...for people who won't want to throw things at the TV like I do when I watch it.

 

Bad Judge (NBC, new.  Sitcom.)

Watched: pilot

Premise: A judge is a total mess personally, but a surprisingly good jurist.

Promise: This show aims for a sort of updated Night Court vibe in places, and that's fun.  It, too, undermines the dignity of the legal system, but I’m less surprised and disappointed by that, because it’s a sitcom and I don’t look to my sitcoms for dignity.  In fact, despite the protagonist’s terrible personal decision-making, I'm somewhat heartened that it shows her making generally competent decisions from the bench. I am troubled that the judge’s colleagues seem to criticize her for her caring, which really isn’t actually how being a judge works (or should work, for that matter).  My chief concern here, though, is that for all her intelligence and compassion, this woman, like the previous protagonist, is a total slave to her emotions (shirking professional duties to look after a child in need makes her a good person, but not a dependable public servant) and her sexuality (with amusing, but undignified and stereotype-promoting results). 

Verdict:  Has some charm and some heart—much the same sort of heart as Bad Teacher, and many of the same problems—but not funny enough to merit the time.

The Divide (WeTV, new over the summer.  Legal drama.)

Watched:  Most of the first season

Premise:  The swirling impacts of the Innocence Initiative’s reinvestigation of a death row case.

Promise:  This is a particularly compelling take on the law, presenting a more nuanced look than most at the strengths and vulnerabilities of the system—particularly the vulnerabilities, and particularly the influence that prejudice can have on the justice process.  Like The Killing, it reaches beyond the mystery and delves into the way the case influences everyone it touches.  The story is awash with moral ambiguity:  in the pilot, we encounter a convicted man who is far from an innocent, but also happens to be the victim of a complicated conspiracy and rush to judgment, fueled by the sorts of ethical lapses that may mean well, but have destructive results nonetheless.  His story triggers a complicated web of consequences that carry the show through the season, revealing larger conspiracies that highlight issues of race and privilege and how they can contort the law.

This show isn’t particularly kind to its attorneys, but—like The Wire—when it depicts the system being bent out of shape, it feels more genuinely critical than sensationalized.  And its protagonist—a young woman studying for the bar exam while interning at the Innocence Initiative in the wake of seeing her father (possibly wrongly) put on death row—seems like a real person.  She, like the previous ones, is driven by her emotional attachments, but in a way that seems less like a stereotype about women and more like the consequences of the kind of personal obsession that anyone could develop.  What’s different about it is that she has a reason for her emotions, other than just being female.  The cast is an impressive assemblage of TV pros, including a few from The Wire, and the show has a similar tone and complexity.  It was originally created for AMC, and I can see why—WeTV did well to pick it up, but I have seen almost no promotion for the show, which was a mistake.  It could have been a water cooler show.

Verdict:  Not always easy to watch, but still worth Netflixing.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  A few lingerers from the summer, and a whole giant bunch from the Fall.  Dominion, Tyrant, The Almighty Johnsons, The Knick, Legends, Z Nation, Red Band Society, The Mysteries of Laura, Madam Secretary, Gotham, Scorpion, Forever, NCIS: New Orleans, Stalker, Gracepoint, Survivor's Remorse, The Flash.