Notes on Southland

The low-rated ensemble police drama Southland became a cause célèbre a few years ago, when it got canceled by an impatient NBC and then unexpectedly rescued by TNT (a basic cable station that typically wouldn’t shell out for such an expensive undertaking).  I have rooted for it too, but its underdog victory isn’t reason enough to declare Southland the new standard-bearer for quality television.

Southland was created by Ann Biderman, a screenwriter (Primal Fear) who worked briefly on NYPD Blue, but it is produced under the umbrella of TV mogul John Wells.  Southland bears a closer resemblance to bustling Wellsian professional dramas like ER and Third Watch than to squadroom ensembles like Hill Street Blues or NYPD Blue.  Many of the creative staff are veterans of one or both of the Wells shows: writers Dee Johnson and Angela Amato Velez, directors Christopher Chulack, Nelson McCormick, and Felix Alcala; actress Lisa Vidal; costume designer Lyn Paolo; and so on.

(Southland also carries some of the DNA of Adam-12 and Dragnet.  A storyline in “Two Gangs,” in which two squad-car partners spend their shift answering trivial “garbage calls,” plays exactly like one of the more quotidian Friday-Gannon episodes.  Like the Jack Webb shows, Southland is resolutely pro-police.  Its LAPD contains flawed cops – such as the spectacularly alcoholic Dewey, played with gusto by C. Thomas Howell – but no corrupt ones.  Positioned on the cultural timeline after Bad Lieutenant, James Ellroy, The Wire, and Training Day, not to mention the pepper-spraying thug brigades that assaulted those unresisting OWS protesters last year, Southland comes across as somewhat naïve.)

Biderman is the showrunner, but ironically Southland’s chief holdover from NYPD Blue is not in the writing; it’s the formal device of the handheld camera, which was novel in 1993 and has become, twenty years later, one of television’s most punishing clichés.  Speaking of clichés: Southland turns the shakycam up to eleven.  It sounds ridiculous, but Southland actually reminds me a little of late Godard (from Eloge de l’amour on), in that many of the important beats seem to take place just outside the frame or in between cuts.  Most shows that use shakycam these days are just mindlessly following the fad, but Southland is arty.  Look at the shot in “Westside” where Regina King lurks totally out of focus in the background for three or four seconds, an eternity in television time, before walking forward into a woozy close-up.  The immediacy, the lurching urgency, of handheld works fine in action sequences, like the exciting car and foot pursuit that concludes “Westside.”  But Southland never anchors the camera, and in the intimate scenes all that unnecessary, exhausting motion becomes a daunting barrier between the actors and the audience.

The other key problem is one of length: Southland is fifty minutes of show in a forty-one minute bag.  It also tops out at ten episodes per season instead of the twenty-two (or more) that a successful network show would get.  Wells and company haven’t scaled their ambitions to match; they’ve crammed Southland with more characters and story than they can service in the time allotted.  The result is that most of the many people who fill the world of Southland remain poorly defined even after several seasons, and instead of fixing the problem, the producers have resorted to writing out some good actors and starting over again with new faces (Lucy Liu, seriously?) who may not exactly be an improvement.  I’m thirteen episodes in, and still trying to figure out what the hell is the problem between emotional detective Sammy Bryant (Shawn Hatosy) and his flaky wife (Emily Bergl), or what kind of cop Bryant is supposed to be; or why the aloof detective Russell Clarke (Tom Everett Scott) acts so sullen and passive around his protective partner (King).  Too late now: Scott was gone before season three, and while Russell’s exeunt had some shadings I hadn’t seen in a cop show before, it didn’t matter much, because there was no character there in the first place.  In its subject matter and its keen eye for the look and feel of Los Angeles, Southland resembles Boomtown, a fine metropolitan drama that didn’t find a cable savior to save it from a premature death, also at NBC’s hands, a decade ago.  Boomtown struggled with its sprawl too – it also axed some good characters too soon – but I wish Southland would emulate the earlier show’s habit of zeroing in on a single figure for a whole episode, whenever that character’s storyline came to a head.

The three characters that do work on Southland are all iterations of familiar cop show archetypes.  The actors who play them are terrific, but the archetypes give them a big advantage over the rest of the cast, a head start in connecting with the audience on a show where everyone is vying desperately for screen time.  Ben Sherman (Benjamin McKenzie) is the first-day rookie.  John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz) is his asshole training officer, a Sipowiczian saint whose crosses to bear include a painkiller addiction and closeted homosexuality.  Chickie Brown (Arija Bareikis) is the outnumbered female beat cop, who’s alternately resigned to and resentful of her colleagues’ casual sexism.

Maybe Southland should have dumped everyone else and focused on this trio, or just on Ben Sherman.  ER, if only by virtue of cast attrition, took shape as a bildungsroman that followed John Carter (Noah Wyle), a med student in the pilot and a seasoned doctor by the end, on a journey to the moral heart of the show.  Sherman is a comparable figure on Southland (with Cooper analogous to Anthony Edwards’s unflappable Mark Greene, and Chickie the equivalent of Julianna Margulies’s Carol Hathaway).  McKenzie, who played the two-fisted street kid adopted into the wealthy candyland of The O.C., has a wonderfully open quality, similar to Wyle’s.  He’s always engaged in his environment, loose, unpredictable, wide-eyed but sharp.  McKenzie is a natural star, a performer built to the intimate scale of television, like David Janssen or David Morse.  But he’s wasted on Southland, a show with no stars in its universe.

The New Classics

Even though the decade doesn’t really end for another year (don’t get me started on the subject of the Year Zero), everyone is playing favorites this month, and I can’t resist joining in.  Typically, I’ve come across plenty of discussion about the best movies of the “aughts,” but not a whole lot about the highlights on the small screen during the same years.

I haven’t written much about “new” TV in this space, mainly because the launch of this blog two years ago coincided with a notable dip in the quality of both network and cable offerings.  But I’ve always insisted on defining “classic” as good rather than just old.  Here, then, are some remarks about the shows that I think stand as the finest of the past ten years.  (Yes, they’re in order of preference.)

1. Veronica Mars (UPN/CW, 2004-2007).  A howl of class resentment masquerading as teen angst, this po-mo Nancy Drew update mined revenge-fantasy gold with its sly premise: Veronica, a middle-class townie among decadent rich kids in a seaside SoCal town, uses the private eye skills she learned from her ex-police chief father (the wonderful Enrico Colantoni) to claw her way up the socioeconomic ladder.  Who wouldn’t want to relive their high school years armed with a Nexis password and a skeleton key to the principal’s office?  Newly-minted star Kristen Bell nailed the title role, cultivating a smart, sullen reserve that explained how Veronica could be beautiful (and capable of belting out a rockin’ karaoke cover of “One Way or Another”) and still a perpetual outsider.  Rob Thomas’s neon-lit neo-noir never took the easy way out, always treading instead into darker places than you thought a UPN show could go: Veronica spent the first season tracking down the rapist who took her virginity.  At the heart of the show was a touching filial bond – daughter and father against the world – but even there trust was not sacrosanct.  When Veronica swiped a clue from his private office safe, Dad said nothing . . . but changed the combo.

2. The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008).  If its teenaged target demographic could overlook the Marxist underpinnings of Veronica Mars, there was no ignoring the class concerns of David Simon’s masterpiece, an epic survey of Baltimore’s haves and have-nots, from wretched crack addicts all the way up to scumbag politicians.  Jaw-droppingly ambitious and intelligent, The Wire earned a rep for complex plotting (“it’s more like a novel than TV,” was the backhanded critical refrain).  But the characters were the reason to watch; they were perhaps the richest and most unpredictable in the history of television, and often the writers seemed to make choices simply to find out what one of their creations would do in a particular circumstance (Prez … as a teacher?).  The inattentive recoiled from The Wire’s final season when the putative protagonist, homicide detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), finally stepped outside the hypocritical professional code that had triggered his self-destructive rampages in the past.  Never mind that the groundwork for this act had been laid carefully for years: there are things that TV heroes just don’t do, and The Wire violated that covenant.  In granting Jimmy some measure of peace at the finale, the series reaffirmed the most essential and sagacious of its basic tenets: that our systems may be unsalvageable but that the people within them always merit respect.  Season Five also served up the best of the show’s trademark civic-arena subplots.  Simon staged a heart-rending tribute to the beat reporting from whence he came with his canonization of an old-school, anti-corporate newsroom editor (an astonishing Clark Johnson, also a key director on the show).  Dare I point out that East Side/West Side, forty years earlier, also closed by invoking the death of independent journalism as a self-referential metaphor?

3. The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007).  If people were generally redeemable in Simon’s vision, the other David – David Chase – saw humanity as corrupt to the core; HBO in the aughts boiled down a Manichean debate between the conditional optimism of The Wire and the misanthropy of The Sopranos.  Indeed, The Sopranos’ central conceit that the mafia are just like us extended, over time, into a premise that every person is trapped in a prison of his or her own making – that we all repeat the same patterns of destructive behavior over and over again in an unbreakable cycle.  Consider Carmela’s endless but always deluded personal re-inventions, Janice’s interchangeable scumbag boyfriends, and of course the gradual decimation of everyone in Tony’s inner circle: viewers who played the game of guessing who would get whacked next missed the forest of existential despair for the trees.  Delighting in the visual contrast between mob violence and the bland New Jersey suburbs, Chase foregrounded his mockery of tracksuits and Starbucks until The Sopranos verged on full-out farce; by the end it had more in common with Seinfeld, the original Show About Nothing, than with The Godfather.

4. The Office (NBC, 2005- ).  Because the original British series was note-perfect, this adaptation seemed doomed, until (during the second season) showrunner Greg Daniels found ways to rebuild its structure to fit the American TV custom of more episodes and open-ended network runs.  One strategy was to shift the focus somewhat from megalomaniac manager Michael Scott (Steve Carell) to a uniformly hilarious supporting cast of office oddballs, most of them played by non- or semi-professional actors.  Another was the use of melodrama – long-running, off-and-on story arcs like Dwight and Angela’s bizarre romance, or Michael’s feud with Toby – as the structural foundation for the gags.  Over time, these complicated subplots began to mimic real life, so that The Office’s jokes became interchangeable with the you-had-to-be-there insider humor of our own workplaces.  Best of all, Daniels and company – and it is a company, of performers and writers who, judging from the leftover scenes on the DVDs, improvise far more than is customary in the sitcom form – enjoy challenging their audience’s complacency.  Jim, the sardonic slacker who provides our easiest point of identification, begins to come off as smug and entitled when he gets the girl or works for a normal boss.  Meanwhile, Michael’s dim-witted worldview seems a bit less infuriating after he meets an adorable soulmate (Amy Ryan, doing a comic version of her character from The Wire).  If there’s a message here, it may be that work makes us all kind of insufferable.

5. Arrested Development (FOX, 2003-2006).  So corrosive in its sensibilities that it was destined to become a cult item, Mitchell Hurwitz’s dazzling satire attacked the American dream with a buzzsaw.  (Literally – much of the action took place in a house that was sliding into oblivion.)  The Bluths were a family of crooked Orange County land developers who were not just decadent and kooky, but utterly narcissistic and vile.  Incest – between the semi-retarded Buster and his perpetually soused mother; between the two tweener cousins; between the “normal” brother Michael and his maybe-sister (played by Jason Bateman and his actual sister, Justine) – was a frequent narrative possibility, and also the key metaphor in the show’s attitude toward the sanctity of family.  Arrested Development skirted so close to ugliness that I was poised to tune out until the most extreme characters, like the semi-retarded Buster (Tony Hale) and the sexually confused Tobias (David Cross), gradually worked their way around to being funny instead of just creepy.  What removed this show from Married With Children territory was its capacity for intricate verbal and physical farce.  As the seasons mounted (only up to three, alas), flocks of throwaway gags – like the one where teenaged Maeby stumbled into a successful career as a Miramax development exec – recurred and extended to the point that Arrested loyalists were rewarded with a laugh on every line or background action.  By the time Buster, the luckless Oedipal casualty with a dominant mother named Lucille, was maimed by an animal that escaped from his magician brother’s act – you got it, a loose seal – it seemed as if the English language itself might have evolved just to suit the show’s needs.

6. The West Wing (NBC, 1999-2006).  Aaron Sorkin’s presidential drama was so much a product of the Clinton era that I’ll bet many viewers have forgotten it was, save for the first few months, a show of the aughts rather than the nineties.  With its fantasy of a Wilsonian academic as president and a court of White House insiders who were philosophers as much as pragmatists, The West Wing was a tonic that helped many of us endure the Bush debacle – even though Sorkin was more likely to turn a New Yorker article into a C-storyline than to tackle any fiery lefty talking points head-on.  Sorkin’s exit just past the midpoint cost the show its brilliant Gilbert-and-Sullivan walk-and-talks, but the maligned “John Wells years” made some acceptable substitutions.  Wells’s core of new writers found flaws in the characters Sorkin had deified, and took a chance on a Robert Drew-derived pseudo-documentary civics lesson during its final Jimmy Smits vs. Alan Alda election storyline.  This was the last, and nearly the best, in the now extinct tradition of the eighties-vintage, character-driven large-ensemble drama.

7. The O.C. (FOX, 2003-2007).  The initial premise was thin, but irresistable: a prince-and-the-pauper variant by which a semi-orphaned delinquent (Ben McKenzie) befriends the son (Adam Brody) of the rich Orange County couple who adopt him.  The two teens engage in a form of mutual gate-crashing: the poor kid, Ryan, gains access to a world of privilege and opportunity, while geeky Seth trades on Ryan’s bad-boy cool factor to become popular.  Add some autobiographical sincerity from creator Josh Schwartz; a raft of snarky, self-referential improvisations by breakout stars Brody and Rachel Bilson; and just the right amount of a grounded truth in Peter Gallagher’s lovely performance as Seth’s mensch of a dad – and you have the feel-good show of the decade, a perfect dream of the way your teen years should have been but weren’t.

8. The Shield (FX, 2002-2008).  Was Vic Mackey, the epically crooked cop at the heart of The Shield, a subhuman monster or a vigilante saint?  I had no doubts about my own opinion of him, and at first I thought creator Shawn Ryan was taking the easy way out by playing the Archie Bunker card – that is, making Mackey (a ferocious Michael Chiklis) charismatic enough to serve as a rallying point for conservative viewers and leaving the rest of us to root for the massing horde of vengeful gangsters, politicians, and internal affairs cops to take him down.  But Vic Mackey turned out to contain multitudes: the ever more torturous and rickety amalgam of rationalizations that enabled Mackey to see himself as a defender of family and innocence rather than a murderer and a thief made him a compellingly ambivalent and complex anti-hero.  As Vic’s poison cascaded downward, everyone in his path (wife, kids, partners, bosses) struck similar bargains with themselves in order to keep the Mackey Problem at arm’s length; some of them, namely the brilliant but troubled serial-killer specialist Dutch (Jay Karnes) and his morally irreproachable partner Claudette (CCH Pounder), spun off into equally fascinating mini-stories of their own.  The Shield sustained an adrenaline-fueled pace that few shows could match, and constructed a vast, grungy world of L.A. lowlifes (on both sides of the law) that made it the best James Ellroy adaptation that’s not actually a James Ellroy adaptation.

9. Boston Public (FOX, 2000-2004).  Running on fumes after the intoxicating nineties (Picket Fences, Chicago Hope, The Practice, Ally McBeal), the written-out David E. Kelley delivered one more of his quirky, sensitive, beautifully observed character dramas for the new millenium.  As unconcerned with teen life as a show set in a high school can be, Boston Public (like Mr. Novak forty years earlier) scrutinized the diverse mix of personalities who made up the mostly dedicated teaching staff of an inner-city campus.  Kelley’s respect for this impossible profession was consistently moving, as were many of the individual performances (especially that of Nicky Katt, as a teacher whose passionate involvement with his students’ problems was complicated by perpetually poor decision-making skills).  As often happened in Kelley’s best work, a prickly but soulful loner came to occupy the show’s emotional center; in this case, it was vice principal Scott Guber (Anthony Heald), a much-loathed martinet with an unnoticed compassion for his students and an unrequited crush on a young teacher (Jessalyn Gilsig).  Guber’s unlikely friendship with the world-weary principal, Steven Harper (Chi McBride), set the stage for the decade’s most poetic two-handed acting to come from a pair of relatively unknown character players.

10. C.S.I. (CBS, 2000- ).  A victim of its own success, C.S.I. dropped off the critical radar after it tainted its brand with a pair of wretched spin-offs.  But the original version maintained its status as the most satisfying mainstream genre show on the air for most of the decade, thanks less to the clever forensic mysteries and the tiresome “bullet-cam” stylistic tics than to the well-rounded cast.  The whole ensemble understood that underplaying was the only way to build characters amid the torrent of technobabble, and star William Petersen maintained a poker face that kept science guru Gil Grissom an enigma all the way up to his 2009 exit.  The handful of episodes written by Jerry Stahl (which introduced the world to “furries” and “adult babies”) revel in their gleeful perversity and sexual frankness, and collectively they represent a kind of morbid humor that remains rare on television.  You can only get away with that when you’re number one.

*

Although I have a pet peeve about top ten lists that morph into “top seventeen” lists, I will comment on a few shows that merit some sort of honorable mention.  I wish I had found room for Jenji Kohan’s Weeds (Showtime, 2005- ).  Its writing is uneven and sometimes lazy, but also hilariously, unapologetically profane (“cockamole on her faceadilla” gave me my loudest laugh of the decade) and perfectly attuned to the weird personas of Mary-Louise Parker and Kevin Nealon.  Nip/Tuck (FX, 2003-2010) has insight, fine performers (especially Julian McMahon and Boston Public castoff Jessalyn Gilsig) and, crucially, some of the most vibrant and empowered women characters on television.  But the consistent streak of cruelty in Ryan Murphy’s world finally turned me away.  Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001-2005) and Alias (ABC, 2001-2006) could have made the list, had either of those very different shows carried the depth and urgency of their first two seasons forward into their last three.  30 Rock (NBC, 2006- ) has overcome most of my initial resistance, and hit some kind of zany peak in its third year.  Fastlane (FOX, 2002-2003) gets the “guilty pleasure” vote: this forgotten one-season cop show catalogued the mindless pleasures of empty banter, expensive man-toys, sexy ladies, and explosions with an infectious glee and a surplus of style.

And while I love Mad Men (AMC, 2007- ), something (maybe just the fact that I haven’t seen the most recent season) kept pushing it out of my top ten.  Like its hero, Don Draper, the show has a way of holding back just when it should burst forward.  Will Mad Men’s undeniable excellence last long enough to earn it a spot in the next decade’s list?  Somehow, I doubt it – but then, I’m not sure if I’m going to last that long, either.