Two Rooms Enter

Over the summer and early fall, two different shows decided to focus on the goings-on in a single hotel room:  HBO’s “Room 104” and TBS’s “The Guest Book.” 

The Guest Room (TBS, new Summer 2017.  Single-camera sitcom.)

Room 104 (HBO, new Summer 2017.  Half-hour drama anthology.)

Watched: Most of each

Premise: Aside from the one similarity, the shows have little in common:  Room 104 is an anthology, depicting entirely unconnected, often surreal or experimental stories—effectively, a series of one-act plays, many about characters' struggles with self-discovery, constrained only by a shared set.  The Guest Book is a sitcom about the locals who run a rental cottage and the visitors who stay there, with stories that trend toward farce. 

Promise:  I'm reviewing these two together because I'm fascinated by the comparison between their respective approaches to human connection and interaction.  Room 104’s episodes vary widely from each other, so it’s hard to say they have a coherent message, but in general they trend toward a vision of humanity plagued by imperfect communication.  Characters mostly enter the room in a state of despair or ennui, and often leave it the same way, but having had one brief, shining moment of compassion, connection, or self-discovery.  In contrast, The Guest Book’s characters enter the room with hope and anticipation, only to discover mismatched expectations or misfortunes await them.  The Guest Book's background arc, a whirl of blackmail and relationship strife, is all about how characters’ selfish deceptions can create problems for themselves and others. 

And yet, somehow, The Guest Book seems more hopeful than its HBO counterpart.  Its characters strive for redemption and connection in a consciously imperfect world.  They end up understanding each other more than they had feared; or finding a sort of awkward happiness that will persist.  Whereas the HBO characters will wander back out into a lonely world in which they do not belong. 

Verdict:  There’s no question that the HBO way is artistic, sometimes inspiringly so.  But I find myself caring more about the silly TBS comedy.

Lighter Fare in Heavier Times

I didn’t really skip the summer.  But—you’re right—I didn’t post, either.  Other responsibilities got in the way.  But the Fall season has started up, and now’s a good time for some quick reviews to get the ball rolling again!  If all goes as planned, I’ll pick up shows from the summer (etc.) as I go.

It’s been a heavy few months.  (For many, even more than for me.)  Natural disasters, social struggle, geopolitical….trouble.  And of course there’s plenty of heavy stuff on TV, too.  But let's set that aside for the moment, and look at some of the lighter fare.  I don’t always review comedies, and my comedy-watching is more sporadic than my drama-watching, but it goes without saying that comedy can be instructive as well as diverting.  What does our comedy tell us right now?  …Well, that a lot of it is either imported, or satirical.  

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  It is a little tough at the moment to laugh without context or reservation.

Hooten & The Lady (CW, UK, new to U.S. Summer 2017.  Action/Adventure.)

Watched:  season, on and off

Premise:  A high-society museum curator and a scruffy treasure hunter flirt their way through globe-hopping artifact-related scrapes.

Promise:  Indiana Jones meet Saturday afternoon first-run syndication, with a retro vibe that feels (a) pretty sexist and xenophobic; and (b) oddly comfortable.  I’m not sure what it says about me that I kind of enjoyed it despite its heavy reliance on stereotypes.  I mean for goodness sake, the female lead doesn’t even get her name in the title.  She’s just “the lady.”  But I suppose it felt sort of nostalgic, and (much like the female lead), every time I found myself getting too frustrated with its presumptions, it would go and do something charming and redemptive.

Verdict:  shrug?

Loaded (AMC, U.K. show (& remake of an Israeli show), new to U.S. Summer 2017.  Dramedy.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise: Four tech entrepreneurs become instant millionaires (and copyright-law defendants) with new pressures to succeed when their app makes it big.

Promise: This show has much of the same appeal, and non-appeal, as Silicon Valley.  It has introspective and triumphant moments, but it walks a thin line between wanting us to like the main characters on one hand, and to experience schadenfreude at their travails, on the other.  And that ends up not working for me, because I, personally, find all of the characters deeply unlikeable.  Their immaturity, presumptuousness, and lack of emotional awareness make for good little story hooks and opportunities for redemption, but I find it too grating to enjoy even those.  I think it comes down to not wanting to watch a bunch of fortunate rich guys act like the world owes them something.

Verdict:  Not for me.

Rosehaven (Sundance, Australian, new to U.S. Fall 2017.  Dramedy.)

Watched: Two episodes

Premise:  A self-doubting, well-meaning man moves back to his small hometown to work at his family business, joined by his best friend, a newlywed whose husband just left her.

Promise:  This is an amiable, quirky small-town dramedy with some of the same sort of charm as Northern Exposure or Doc Martin.  Our two main characters are mostly competent, but deeply fallible, and the small-town environment is a good backdrop for their foibles and successes.  It foregrounds a world of human-sized, mostly-fixable problems and has compassion for its characters’ deeper conundrums and uncertain futures.

Verdict: This isn’t must-watch TV, but it’s a comfortable, redemptive diversion.

The Jim Jefferies Show (Comedy Central, Summer 2017.  News-focused comedy.)

The Opposition with Jordan Klepper (Comedy Central, new Fall 2017.  News satire.)

Weekend Update: Summer Edition (NBC, Summer 2017.  News-focused and sketch comedy.)

The Baroness von Sketch Show (IFC, Canadian, new to U.S. Fall 2017.  Sketch comedy.)

…This isn’t a comprehensive list, by any means, but it’s an interesting array of half-hours that arrived over the summer and fall, demonstrating the import-and-satire trend.  Jim Jefferies, Jordan Klepper, and the SNL team have each produced half-hours of news-focused observational and investigative comedy/satire, adding to the already rich field of Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, and others.  The Baroness Von Sketch Show is a Canadian import featuring short, witty, feminist, often outrageous sketch comedy by a four-woman team.  Each challenges the sociopolitical structures of our day by highlighting their ridiculousness.  Each feels needed right now.

In the Hopper:  Seasons’ worth…

The Mistress Manipulator

There’s a longstanding trope about women and power, that women rule from the shadows. The idea is that while women may not have positions of official power, they can still wield real power, by using reverse-psychology, sexuality, and various other manipulation techniques to get powerful men to do their bidding.  In fact, as I think about it, it's almost implicit in the valance of the words "master" and "mistress":  the master is the one in charge, but the mistress is the one who pulls his strings.

This is a storytelling trope for a reason, of course.  It goes without saying that in many places and periods throughout history, law dictated that only way women could wield power was through men.  Even now, ask almost any woman in management and she’ll tell you they’ve gained the skill of convincing the men around them to adopt the women’s ideas by imagining that they were the men’s own.  And from a storytelling standpoint, it's just compelling.  There's dramatic triumph in watching an underdog defeat oppression and exercise power, using only the means they can muster to exploit the weaknesses of those who purport to be their superiors. 

So it’s a worthy trope.  But we shouldn’t ignore its problematic elements.  Because it’s so often the story of women, it perpetuates a vision of women’s power as descending not from straightforward competence, but from underhandedness.  And it bleeds into life:  actual women associated with actual male leaders have to work that much harder to avert vague assumption that they are false, behind-the-scenes manipulators.  (To be clear, I don't think life is easier for single women in politics, or women whose significant others aren’t male leaders, but I think each gets tarred with a different brush. Likewise, there’s no shortage of manipulative men on TV—see, e.g., House of Cards—but their manipulation isn’t couched as triumph in the same way.)  The trope also perpetuates the larger idea that women’s friendly overtures can’t be trusted, because they may be masking deeper motives.  It’s part of the whole “women, amirite? Who can guess what they’re thinking?” malarkey.

So how do some recent shows fare with their depictions of female power-wielding?  Mixed.

Queen of the South (USA, Summer 2016, returning soon for season 2. Organized Crime Drama.)

Watched:  first two episodes

Premise:  The tumultuous rise of a drug queenpin from the very bottom to the very top.

Promise: This show is not one of those “lead from behind” shows, at all.  This is a show about women who want power and take it, often at gunpoint.  I love the tenacity and determination of the lead, but I don’t see her ultimate fate—the top of the heap of a deplorable business—as a particular success.  So while I’m cheering for her in the human sense of wanting someone’s circumstances to improve, the whole endeavor feels futile and self-destructive.  (In fact, I think this is part of the problem with “money and power” shows more generally—I don’t conceptualize success in quite the same way the characters do, and it hard for me to identify with them.  Maybe that’s a point for a whole different post.)  In any case, the stakes were high and the performances were appealing, but I still couldn’t bring myself to root for them.

Verdict:  Didn’t work for me.

Victoria (PBS/Masterpiece, Winter 2017.  Historical drama.)

Watched: season

Premise:  Chronicles a slightly fictionalized rule of Queen Victoria of England

Promise:  Here, we have a woman whose reign is official but whose power is constantly questioned, so she often has to rely on male allies to achieve her goals despite her rank.  When her reign begins she is young, naiive, and in over her head, and we watch her as she gains experience and confidence.  Victoria herself is largely guileless, but those around her aren’t, so the show doesn’t wholly escape the trope.   And while it upends tropes (as Victoria’s reign did) by giving us a prince consort who feels as marginalized as a queen consort would, it doesn’t portray him as maneuvering from the shadows the way a similarly situated TV queen consort might.  In any case, I enjoyed the show a great deal; it provides an enjoyable portrayal of a transitional-yet-familiar period.  Performances and production are strong, and the show has just enough lightheartedness to keep from being a sodden history.

Verdict:  enjoyable.

Feud: Bette & Joan (FX, new.  Drama.)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise:  Joan Crawford and Bette Davis work with and against each other to reinvigorate their late-stage careers.

Promise:  This show is about ageism, sexism, and the competitive tension between two stars whose real enemy is time.  Each of these women has mastered the art of leading from behind, making the system work to their advantage by playing on the egos and insecurities of the men around them, and the show highlights one of the pitfalls of such an approach, namely that it comes with an expiration date.  It reveals, but alas does not condemn, a further pitfall of such an approach:  that it cedes ultimate power to men, by making them the arbiters of sexual appeal.  The performances are wonderful, and the story is juicy, but I’m so terribly tired of seeing TV shows about women who resent each other’s success and manipulate each other’s jealousy that I don’t even care about its historical accuracy and deep nuance.  What I mean to say is that this show is, fundamentally, a very male take on female issues.  The woman carp about each other’s attractiveness to men.  All they want is the men’s attention, to be sexually desired. “Winning,” for each is about male approval.  And while that may be realistic, I just don’t want to spend time my TV time there.

Verdict:  I want to support the cast, but not the topic.  Couldn’t we have a different one? Just imagine what these two brilliant actresses could have done with a story about, say, the women’s suffrage movement.

The White Princess (Starz, new.  Historical fiction/period drama.)

Watched: First three episodes

Premise:  Fictionalized portrayal of the betrothal and reign of Elizabeth of York, queen consort of Henry VII (Tudor).

Promise: This fully embodies the rule-from-the-shadows trope, as the York women plot from inside to undermine the Tudors.  Historically, we know they are doomed to fail, which makes their pride poignant and pathetic, but that is not the point of the show, which is a drama of power, manipulation, jealousy, resentment, and occasionally something resembling love.  It not only portrays women as manipulators, but also toys with the English-mystic idea of “women’s magic” (my term, although I’m sure there are much more formal and studied terms)—the witchcraft of certain English women to poison dreams and force luck.  Those things are mostly turnoffs for me, but thus far I’ve stuck with the show because of the lead character’s stubborn insistence on being herself rather than any of the people that others want her to be.  This is perhaps clearest in the show’s portrayal of her rape by her future husband, which (for once!) isn’t sensationalized or excused, but instead portrayed as a rape—a moment in which she outwardly yields, but inwardly retains her pride and selfhood.  But as the show’s focus shifts to a broader geopolitics and her marriage takes shape, I’m not sure the show will hold my interest.

Verdict:  Jury’s still out.

On the Docket:  still lots of shows, but I’m still mulling the topic. 

Your Problem is You See The Good in People

I was all ready to publish a post about TV conceptions of terrorism.  It was all written and everything, entitled “The Terrorist is Coming from Inside the House,” focusing on how TV perpetuates a vision of terrorism as an outsider problem even when it’s perpetrated by insiders.  Early TV about terrorism defined it as something international, done by outsiders who pierced or infiltrated our national idyll.  Recent shows have moved the terror threat inside, portraying domestic and home-grown terrorist, but even these insider TV terrorists are still outsiders—racial, ethnic, or religious others who have been radicalized from afar by foreign interests.  This perpetuates a vision of immigrants and minorities as ticking time bombs, and in the rare circumstance where a white person becomes a terrorist, it’s a dramatic twist engineered to surprise, a shock that only goes to show how seductive these radical others can be.  It breeds fear of the other, while widening the racialized and false distinction between “terrorism” and, for example, “mass shootings.”

And that was a fine post, as far as it went.  But then I got into writing about the actual shows, and I noticed they all had something else in common:  a deeply cynical conception of pessimism as strength.  In each, there is a leading man in a position of political or practical power who is told, implicitly or explicitly, that his chief problem is that he sees the good in people.  Trust is weakness, these shows say.  There’s an implication, never stated, that trust is feminized and unleaderly.  They prefer suspicion, aggression, and “shoot first” diplomacy. 

That vision bugs me personally because it’s so different from mine.  I am the kind of person who looks for the good in people—even people for whom the good isn’t always the first or most obvious thing one sees.  In general, that’s served me well in life.  Occasionally it means I get surprised or disappointed, but more often I’d like to think that those surprises and disappointments would come either way, and my way involves less routine suffering and maybe even better ways of coping with conflict. 

But my personal preference aside, there's a much bigger problem here, when a show condemn seeing the good in people while it also links terrorism and otherness.  It’s that suspicion-based combination that makes people advocate for preemptive bombings and racist immigration policies.  If that's all you see on television, it's no wonder people accept these ideas as sensible rather than alarmist.

I'm not saying that the attitude ruins these shows.  (I liked Shooter, at least.)  But when they work, it’s despite the attitude, not because of it. 

Designated Survivor (ABC, Fall 2016.  Drama.)

Watched: First several episodes

Premise: After a bomb hits the State of the Union Address, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development becomes president and the FBI investigates what happened.

Promise: This show has a lot of fascinating things going on:  Political machinations among those newly risen to power.  Mystery elements as to who was behind the bomb, and why.  Philosophical explorations about how power influences decision-making.  I enjoyed the potential of each, and I loved Kal Penn as an insightful speechwriter-turned-adviser. But I was hoping the show would be more redeeming than it was—or, put differently, I was disappointed when the lead character’s power began to overcome his well-meaning, and the show didn’t punish him for what I saw as objectively bad decisions.  Still, I probably would have kept watching for longer if our own election hadn’t hit, leaving me hungry for TV that took a more aspirational or critical view of politics.

Verdict:  I couldn’t bring myself to watch it after the election.

Shooter (USA, Fall 2016.  Long-form thriller/Drama.)

Watched: Season

Premise: Exceptionally skilled sniper is framed for an assassination and goes on the run to unravel the plot and vindicate himself

Promise: This was a good, twisty, conspiracy chase, full of competence and shifting alliances.  I particularly loved the show’s central female characters—the main investigator pursuing the sniper, and the sniper’s wife, respectively.  They were persistent, resourceful, and realistic, feminine without being feminized.  I’m not sure whether the show passed the Bechdel test, but even so, it never felt marginalizing.  I was also fascinated by the show’s attitude toward guns—respect for their power, for both good and ill, and respect for those who wield them with skill.  I expected myself to find the show’s firearm-centricity off-putting, but although the show was definitely brutal, it never felt celebratory.  The show wasn’t perfect—it was a bit scattered and didn’t connect its many conspiracy threads as well as I’d have liked—but I didn’t find that fatal.

Verdict:  pretty good twisty conspiracy stuff.

24: Legacy (Fox, new.  Action/Adventure.)

Watched:  first two episodes

Premise:  A revival of the 2001-2010 series, set after the events of the first series

Promise:  24 was groundbreaking when it aired—not only by premiering the ticking real-time format, but also by tackling premise of the kind of terrorism that struck the Twin Towers in 2001.  Since 2001, scores of shows have adopted 24’s version of terrorism along with the premise it developed over several seasons, that violence and torture are effective in fighting it.  In the intervening time, threats to the American way of life have morphed.  24’s brand of terrorism is a classic for a reason, but now nether the format nor the terror threats seem as revelatory as they did back then.  I like that the new star is African-American, but I’m turned off that his family are stereotypical drug-trade gangsters.  Do we need yet more racialized stereotyping othering, atop the racialized stereotyping of terrorists?

Verdict:  I tuned out.

Prison Break (Fox, new.  Long-form thriller/Drama.)

Watched: First episode

Premise:  A revival of the 2005-2009 series, set after the events of the first series.

Promise:  I suspect this series is a real boon for fans of the original series, but as someone who hadn’t watched much of the original, I found it confusing to be thrown into a world of characters we were expected to know.  This is one of those “everyone has secrets and may not be who they say they are” setups.  This show flips the first season on its head—now, older brother must rescue younger from prison, rather than vice versa—and it’s layered with what I’m sure will be a very twisty plot about middle-eastern terrorism.  I’m sure it’ll bring a lot of drama, but the first episode felt laden with stereotypes and didn’t make me care about the people.  

Verdict:  If I had already cared, I would probably be in for this.  But it didn’t work for me as an outsider.

In the Hopper:  A whole bunch of shows!  Maybe I’ll tackle the music shows next?  Or the shows about women in power?

Trusting The System

A few months ago, some friends and I were observing with some friends that although courtroom shows have always been a mainstay of television, the heroes have changed.  Time was, the heroes were defense-attorneys like Perry Mason and Matlock.  Gradually, prosecutors took their place with the Law & Order franchise.  The preponderance of investigative procedurals gradually shifted from private investigation (Rockford Files, Magnum, PI) to the law-enforcement-knows-best ethos of the CSI and NCIS franchises.    

There are plenty of exceptions to these trends, of course, but over time the prevailing ethos does seem to have shifted more and more toward endorsing the authorities.   In fact, it trusts the authorities so much that it almost circles back to not trusting the system.  The pro-law-enforcement trend continued so far beyond endorsing prosecutors and police that it created a flood of righteous rule-breakers whose instincts toward justice and order somehow transcend the systemic restrictions of civil liberties.  If Law & Order is the ultimate system-truster, what do we call shows that endorse warrantless searches and tuning up perps as a road to better order (if perhaps not law)?  These righteous rule-breaker shows tell us to trust the system even when it isn’t working as designed.

And that strikes dangerous right now.  There is, of course, a certain degree of comfort in trusting the system.  When the system leads to a bad result—and it’s led to some real whoppers of bad results in recent memory—at least we can console ourselves that it’s the result of a system we’ve chosen.  We have to accept that result as a new point in a sea of data, and work to change the system so it leads to better results more of the time.  A great glory of our system design is that if it leads to bad results often enough, we are at least theoretically empowered, as a people, to change it.

But changing the system requires looking at it critically.  Observing when and why it leads to bad results, so we can embark on change when that happens.  Observing when and how it leads to different results for different people.  The power to change the system is illusory if we never consider what works and what doesn’t.  In a time when the authorities are, appropriately, under scrutiny for a host of interrelated ills including racial bias and militarized violence, television is important enough that it should not only provide the comforts of fictional justice, but also shine a light on the causes of our anxieties.    We need shows like Law & Order to show us how the system should work, and comfort us that it often does.  And we need shows that genuinely explore the dynamics and risks of a flawed system, like The Wire.  But we don’t need shows that convince us a broken system is an effective one. 

So how, and how much, do recent new shows trust and challenge the system?  We’ve got a lot of shows to choose from for this post, and interestingly, quite a few of them challenge the system directly.  But we’ve also got some real polar opposites in this group, and a few in the middle. 

Conviction (ABC, Fall 2016.  Law Enforcement Procedural.)

Watched: season

Premise:  A DA’s Office team led by a rebellious president’s daughter reinvestigates convictions and often exonerates convicts.

Promise:  This show starts from the premise that the system sometimes gets it wrong, and then gives us a system-based solution.  It posits that if given the opportunity, the authorities would prefer to get it right every time.  The procedural element of this show gives us the certainty that the Serial podcast lacked—every week, it questions the process, reinvestigates a crime, and tells us whether a conviction was right or wrong.  The investigations are clever, the cases are interesting and often provocative, and the team works well.  Regrettably, those cases are surrounded by a soapy arc that too often gives off a “women be crazy” vibe.  It walks the line between celebrating its heroine’s uncompromising insistence on being herself and sensationalizing her sexuality and impulsiveness.  I could have done with more of the former and less of the latter, since the “herself” turned out not only to be occasionally rash and self-sabotaging, but also intensely intelligent, clever, and dedicated to justice and compassion.

Verdict:  I would have preferred it without its soapy bits, but I’m still sad it was canceled.

Eyewitness (USA, Fall 2016.  Law Enforcement Drama.)

Watched: season

Premise:  A rural policewoman investigates a murder that was, unbeknownst to her, witnessed by her foster son and another young man.

Promise:  This is adapted from a Scandinavian show, and that shows in the mood.  There’s a mystery to be solved and we learn pretty early that not all of the authority figures are to be trusted, but the show’s central focus is on the characters’ complex ecosystem of needs, fears, secrets, and lies.  The central initial tension seems dated:  in this day and age, would two teenagers in rural New York (where I grew up) still refuse to come forward because they want to hide their same-sex assignation?  Maybe, I suppose.  But the show centers around universal themes.  The characters crave genuine connection, love, safety, self-worth—and even if we wouldn’t do the same things, we feel the characters’ humanity.  The show is more personal than The Killing, but its deliberative pace an emotional focus feel similar.

Verdict:   Drew me in.

Sweet/Vicious (MTV, winter 2016.  Drama.)

Watched: season

Premise:  Two female college students carry out a vigilante campaign against sexual assaulters.

Promise:  This show is very much about a failure of the system.  It’s an intense mix of wry humor, deep emotional content, and teen drama.  The characters are complicated and feel real, even if they might have stepped from the pages of a comic book.  The stories are frank about the seriousness, pervasiveness, and damaging nature of rape culture in a way that I think no show before has ever done.  It’s telling that most episodes start with a trigger warning.  But it isn’t preachy; it’s entertainment about a subject it knows is problematic.  Like Veronica Mars, it’s casual about horrifying things in a way that doesn’t blunt our vigilantes’ suffering but makes their actions more bearable.  Thankfully, it never quite endorses those actions—but it also shows us how flaws in the system brought us to this point.

Verdict:  Generally well done.

APB (Fox, new.  Law Enforcement Procedural.)

Watched:  three or four episodes

Premise:  A tech entrepreneur outfits a New York police department with advanced surveillance tech

Promise: This show could be a cautionary tale about the dystopian horrors of a surveillance society.  Instead, it’s a show about the wonders of high-tech law enforcement.  It gives our central character selfish motives, cocky confidence, and abusable power, and yet somehow makes him and his force effective and well-meaning, and make those who challenge him into the villains of the piece.  It reminds me of how Fox managed to turn Minority Report from the horrors of punishing as-yet uncommitted crimes into “let’s solve crimes using precogs!”  I’m not saying that high-tech policing is always bad.  Surely there are ways it can improve safety and fairness without gobbling up civil liberties.  But this show doesn’t do any soul-searching.  Instead, it lulls viewers into thinking that justice-at-any-cost is still justice.  It’s the same trick that normalizes warrantless wiretapping and enhanced interrogation.

Verdict:  I really liked some of the characters, and the concept of treating law enforcement as if it were an engineering problem is one worth exploring.  But that didn’t stop the rage quit.

Doubt (CBS, new.  Courtroom Drama.)

Watched: first three episodes

Premise: Defense lawyers try to find the right results.

Promise:This show has been canceled.  It suffered from being two shows.  One was a long-form courtroom/mystery arc in the style of Murder One, featuring Katherine Heigl developing an ill-advised romantic relationship with her client.  The other was a defense-attorney drama with a case-a-week format in the vein of The Practice, featuring Dule Hill and Laverne Cox wrestling with the challenges of criminal defense.  The latter was good—Dule Hill and Laverne Cox were great, and they and senior partner Elliott Gould could have carried a solid defense-attorney procedural.  But the show didn’t hold together, and I tired quickly of the did he/didn’t he of the defense arc, and Heigl’s weak-kneed version of emotional attachment.

Verdict: I would have liked to see part of the show continue, but the cancellation made sense.

Chicago Justice (NBC, new.  Courtroom procedural.)

Watched: season so far

Premise:  Prosecutors try to find the right results.

Promise:  This show is part of the greater Dick Wolf universe, and it fits well there.  It’s more skeptical of the system than most Law & Order shows, which makes some sense considering how deeply broken the system of “Chicago PD” is.  Unlike Chicago PD, which too often tacitly endorses shortcuts and abuses, Chicago Justice asks questions and acknowledges that the answers aren’t always ideal.  But it also fundamentally, profoundly, and idealistically trusts the system. This is a show where the good guys always outsmart the bad guys, where intellect defeats evil, and where shortcuts don’t pay. 

Verdict:  Comforting without being blindly optimistic.

                                                                                                                   

Shots Fired (Fox, new. Law Enforcement Drama.)

Watched:  season so far

Premise: After a black police officer shoots a young white man in North Carolina, a Justice Department attorney and investigator go there to investigate.

Promise:  This show is about the far-reaching causes and effects of cracks in the system.  It often shows-not-tells about how deep these fissures go, how lines based on authority and cultural capital subtly descend from and exacerbate intersectional differences in opportunity and perception. The story grows quickly from one about a single racially-charged incident into something broader-reaching and possibly conspiratorial, and our characters grow to match that expansion.  I wish that it stayed with the systemic problems, but the conspiratorial element does make the story more propulsive.  The characters seem flawed and admirable in ways we can identify with, and while the show portrays stereotypes, it doesn’t seem to endorse them.

Verdict:  Pretty good.

Rebel (BET, new.  Law Enforcement Drama.)

Watched: season so far

Premise:  After her younger brother is shot by fellow officers, a black police officer leaves the force to be a private investigator.

Promise:  There are things about this show that I really like.  Giving our tough, closed-off ex-military lead an emotional outlet of slam poetry is fantastic.  Her confidence, her ingenuity, and her military history are great.  Her relationship with her ex-partner is complex and interesting.  The PI cases she takes on will work as procedural stories.  But the show tries to be too many things at once, and its tone is all over the place, whiplashing between thoughtful justice-seeking and campy sexpot/badassery.  By episode three, it’s starting to find its tone, and it may end up settling into a format like Castle, where a case-a-week procedural floats atop a background arc-plot about a more personal investigation.  But I want the show to decide whether it’s The Wire or Foxy Brown.

Verdict:  Guarded optimism.

In the Hopper:  Hmmm.  Which theme next?  I’m Still deciding.