TV is the New Reading

Cop shows highlight different law enforcement environments

“You’re a cop because you don’t know how to be anything else.”

LAPD rookie Ben has just fatally shot a gangbanger who’d been cuffed but inadequately searched, who proceeded to shoot a fellow officer. And Ben’s borderline psychotic partner John Cooper selects this moment to launch into a rah-rah tirade about how being a cop puts him in the front row to the greatest show on Earth, and how he’s a cop because he doesn’t know how not to be one, and if Ben feels that way, he’s a cop. And if he doesn’t, he’s not.

Step back a moment.

‘Southland’

It’s Ben’s first day on NBC’s premiere of “Southland,” and no one has any respect for a rookie -- in fact, he is told, if he does anything the way he learned at the Academy, he’ll die. All Cooper’s been doing is ragging on him, especially since he got sick at the sight and smell of a half-eaten dead guy.

So when Ben has the task of taking down a gang member in a bust they’ve been planning for zero minutes, with no recon, no intel -- essentially, they storm a gangland stronghold on the basis of some random citizen pointing a finger -- a ranking officer dismisses Ben’s stated wish to search his suspect, grabs him and gets shot and seriously injured. The forces Ben to shoot the suspect, and allows Cooper to show as much disdain for Ben’s horror at having taken a life as for his nausea earlier.

So we’ve got warrantless search and seizure, a complete lack of Mirandizing and alpha-macho posturing in a culture of departmental thuggery.

Cooper’s psychotic lack of humanity contrasts with Det. Lydia Adams, the young black officer who investigates the kidnapping of a young girl. She conducts interviews and follows leads, but uncovers her biggest clue in a trail of ants leading actually from her mother’s home to the girl’s dead body. In tracing the ant trail, she is knocked unconscious by the girl’s abductor. She regains consciousness to discover him sobbing. He’s a family man with a fetish for little girls, and having accidentally strangled her, he kept his latest victim in a closet in his home, which his family didn’t discover but which the ants ... did.

There are also interviews of witnesses back at the stationhouse that have some bearing on the non-aggravated gang shooting at the top of the show, but everything was so disorganized and cobbled together that by the time I saw them -- and the aggressive sexism in a conversation involving women on the SWAT team -- I was so disinterested it simply didn’t matter. These might very well be the lives and the stories of the 9,800 men and women pledged to keep order among 4 million folks across 500 square miles, but I’m not especially interested in any of them.

‘The Unusuals’

Things aren’t significantly better for law enforcement on the East Coast with ABC’s premiere of “The Unusuals,” but I find the characters of the No. 2 Precinct are infinitely more relatable.

Amber Tamblyn’s Lt. Casey Schraeger is called in from the vice squad elsewhere because there’s an opening and because she can pick up where her late predecessor left off in tracking a crooked cop. Her captain wants to keep the investigation on the q.t., but in pairing her with the guy’s former partner, Jeremy Renner’s Det. Jason Walsh, they’re able to uncover a few things -- including a storage locker where he’d been holding what looked like evidence for blackmailing other cops. Casey’s initial investigations get some promising traction, but she’s on the trail of the big fish, not the small fry.

In and among all of this No. 2 is dispatching officers to chase down criminals dressed as hot dogs and pirates and such a kooky collection of crazies I was reminded fondly of “Barney Miller.” In this case, the officers are terrifically paranoid, like Harold Perrineau’s Det. Leo Banks, who has an irrational fear of the number 42 (not surprisingly, given that both his father and grand- father died at his current age of 42), and his partner, Adam Goldberg’s Det. Eric Delahoy, who has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and is trying to die on the job for the insurance money. At the center of it all is Monique Gabriela Curnen as Det. Allison Beaumont, an outrageously sassy and sprightly figure who keeps things hopping at the stationhouse.

And while Walsh is insightful enough to intuit what kind of underwear Schraeger’s wearing, he is unable to deduce that she comes from a remarkably well-to-do family -- a family that has nothing but contempt for her decision to become a cop and no understanding of how that might be important -- how a murder investigation, say, might trump her father’s birthday party.

The upshot

Both “The Unusuals” and “Southland” have target audiences, and I don’t think I’m any more in the mood for gritty realism in a police drama than I am in a medical drama. Personally, I’m much more about characters and storylines than I am about “realism” in such dramas anyway, and really look for the dramatic context to provide a basic setting and let a talented team of writers and actors take it from there.

So I’ll take “The Unusuals” with its unlikely collection of characters and arcing corruption storylines above “Southland’s” disparate collection of seemingly random events in exactly the same way as I’ll take “Grey’s Anatomy’s” overwrought romantic squabbling over “ER’s” realism and otherwise disconnected structure. It’s certainly possible for those more constructed and character-driven dramas to occasionally get silly and soapy, but I find them more satisfying as storytelling in the same way I find a novel to be more engaging than a months’-worth of police logs.

NBC’s “Southland” airs at 9 p.m. Thursdays and is marked with graphic violence and strong language. ABC’s “The Unusuals” airs at 9 p.m. Wednesdays.

Back Back to Shows Back to Main Page Next