TV Review Round Up 2

 A second round up of TV shows I've watched and decided to write up, grouped here as "mostly crime".

****

1. The Rookie Season 3

One of the least entertaining conceits of this show is the end-of-season cliffhanger. At the end of season 2, John Nolan, oldest rookie in the LAPD, is framed for murder and being an informer for organised crime. He manages to resolve this, but gets a permanent black mark on his record (making it unlikely for him to become a detective and delaying him advancing out of training).

Meanwhile, like a lot of American cop shows, it has to confront the criticisms of policing raised this last summer in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in police custody. The Rookie, which gets most of it’s charm by mixing quiet, low-impact policing (traffic stops, street arguments etc) with chases, shoot outs and grim-faced confrontations, finds it struggles with this. Still it tries. It’s pointed out to Nolan by his lawyer that he, a middle-aged home-owning white police officer, is treated with kid gloves by the department when they come to arrest him for being framed. Jackson, one of the other rookies, gets a new training officer (played by Brandon Routh), who’s racist and authoritarian. (It’s noted that he got his start with the LA Sherriff’s department, who spend their first two years guarding the county jail(s), which formed his view of policing).

Later Nolan starts taking night classes to finish his degree (one more of his attempts to wipe out the black mark) and gets into things with his civil rights activist professor. All this gropes towards a better policing, an admirable effort for a cop show, but it’s stuck with stating the terms of the debate and occasionally marking minor victories.

(Being oddly out of time – the three seasons have taken place over about a year of time in show – events do not map onto real history so COVID and the BLM protests have not shown up directly.)

Anyway, one of the training officers jumps ship to become a detective, and she (and the other characters) tangle with a legendary gangster from Guatemala. She’s also pregnant and engaged to a lawyer (the one Nolan gets to defend him in fact) who’s from a rich family leading to some culture clash about the wedding; this is actually one of the longest running storylines, leading of course to the fun celebration at the end of the season (SPOILERS: There’s a cliffhanger). Lucy, one of the other rookies, wants to go undercover, also her parents disapprove of her being a cop, which comes to a head when she and Jackson finish their probation.

The Rookie works well, it is put together with care and occasionally wit, and if it’s delicate handling of the problems of policing don’t ever allow anything to be resolved, well that turns out to be a reflection of real life too.

Watch This: Cop stories, small, big, trying to do better
Don’t Watch This: You’ve got enough crime stories

2. Prodigal Son Season 2

At the end of season 1 (skip to the Watch This section to avoid SPOILERS) Nicholas Endicott threatened to destroy the Whitly family, or even more so than usual (their regular dysfunctional relationships between imprisoned serial-killer father Martin, alcoholic mother Jessica, obsessive criminal profiler son Malcolm Bright and relatively well-adjusted journalist daughter Ashley are always on the verge of spinning out of control). Malcolm can’t bring himself to follow in his father’s footsteps and kill Endicott, but Ashley does. Malcolm covers it up, Ashley having no memory of it from trauma.

This propels the first half of the season as Bright continues to deal with the murder of the week, and JT, a detective, is racially profiled by responding cops, in the show’s attempts to grapple with Black Lives Matter et al. If JT complains, then that will end his career as how can other cops trust him when he’s turned them in? Anyway, enough of that, back to serial-killer-family shenanigans. This comes to a head when camp European celebrity detective Simon Hoxley* comes to New York having discovered Endicott’s body in Estonia.

In the second half they bring on Catherine Zeta-Jones as the doctor in the asylum Martin Whitly is in and a long-brewing escape attempt. Perhaps sadly the show was cancelled at the end of the second season. It does, however, have an actual ending so that’s nice.

Watch This: Psychological outrageous murder of the week with some good performances
Don’t Watch This: Every twist and turn has to raise the weirdness, gruesomeness or the stakes to cartoonish levels

* Played by Alan Cumming; disappointingly Cumming is not playing Dylan Reinhart, his character in Instinct, who is a camp consultant for the NYPD, which would have been an hilarious cross-over.

3. The Watch

Somewhere in a distant Secondhand Dimension is The Watch, a TV show inspired by Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. And inspired by is the right word. They’ve changed the plots and stories (inevitable given the change in format), the setting (it looks cool but this is not the canonical Ankh-Morpork), the themes and feelings (hmm) and the characters (uh-oh!). So what’s left?

What we have is a grimly funny post-apocalyptic city run by criminal guilds, less criminal guilds, and wizards, threatened by a dragon, a time-travelling criminal and peril from outside space and time, protected by a motley band of misfit police, that veers wildly from grim crime thriller, through dark macabre humour, weird magics, to occasional outbreaks of farce. This is pretty good, though it often felt as though one more draft might have evened things out a bit (though behind the scenes one more draft is how we got so far from the novels).

Which means that just when we’re getting into a bit of detective work we find that the Watch have to form a band and audition for the Musicians Guild to go undercover, meanwhile there’s a tense and scary infiltration of the Assassin’s Guild undercut by the cool black-clad assassins often being admin-drones, and their leader Dr Cruces trying bad office comedy. None of this sequence is actually bad (there’s a few actually bad scenes and jokes elsewhere in the show) but the jarring shift in tone requires a lot from the audience watching.

Which is a pity as some of the jarring shifts in tone do work. Death, for example, turning up when things are at their grimmest, and being more interested in his own obsessions than the fact that people are dying and fates sealed. In the retirement home, a fight between Vimes and Carcer is interrupted by the magical security system that has them dancing to Wham!’s Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, during which they both reveal more of their relationship and what is actually going on. The show has several things to say about gender, in part with the gender-blind casting (Anna Chancellor plays Lord Vetinari, The Patrician of The City, as (mostly) a man, in what I’m fairly sure is an understated joke) and in part with Cheery’s non-binary repudiation of their uni-gendered Dwarven background.

This obviously fails as a straight Pratchett adaption. On it’s own terms it’s a bit too silly. As a work in direct conversation with Pratchett, it’s fascinating, seeing how they try and occasionally succeed in adapting his ideas into this new setting and format, and also how they often closely fail, Pratchett’s mastery of his own form and medium unable to be adapted.

I don’t have a conclusion here. Is it good as it’s own thing? Yes, it is, sometimes, on it’s own terms and as a show that has something to say about Pratchett. Is it as good as reading a Pratchett book? No, mostly not, which is not usually a failure for a TV show, but when you’re “inspired by” you invite comparison. Some bits nicely and satisfyingly wind together (music for example) while others don’t (Death wants to join the band, SPOILERS doesn’t).

Watch This: My “Watch This” section comes into it’s own again, not since Watchmen has it been so apt, the whole thing circles back to the concept of the Watch and how you can’t just stand and watch, but have to get involved, but specifically you should watch this for a cool-styled retro-futuristic-fantasy adventure
Don’t Watch This: If you want your Pratchett neat, not questioned or turned around
Once Again: I have (mostly) enjoyed Marama Corlett appearing in a weird and possibly doomed TV series, after her turns in Sinbad and Blood Drive

4. MacGyver

The 4^th season of MacGyver was cut short by COVID and also by other problems, but you wouldn’t know it. It seemed very complete. Still, it seems they felt they had some loose ends to wrap up, perhaps because they knew it was likely to be cancelled (as indeed it was).

So we track down the remnants of Codex, the eco-fascist bad guys from the last season, and this allows one last confrontation with Murdoch, MacGyver’s bomb/trap-maker nemesis. More pertinently there’s a story about Jack Dalton, who’s been killed tracking down a villain. And Mac makes up with Desi, his on/off again girlfriend, in the course of which (an episode set at a posh wedding) he and Riley make peace with their half-hearted will-they/won’t-they plotline.

They circle around MacGyver’s (both the show and, more deeply, the character) ambiguity as a (less-lethally) armed agent of the US government. At a generic eastern European (mostly-) peaceful revolution Mac briefly notes that he’s been at Black Lives Matters protests. And [SPOILERS] the nano-particle trackers they’re infected with as part of that, and the hunt for the source that drives the last half of the season turn out to be funded by the US government. Without explicitly joining the dots, this leads to the final scene in which Mac and the team attempt to resign, at which point Russ Taylor claims he’s cutting ties between the Phoenix Foundation and the government. Good luck with running a rogue para-military organisation without tacit government approval lads.

There’s a few good setpieces, and also a few signs that they were starting to get to the end of their box of tricks. An episode is set in a rip-off of the John Wick Continental Hotel (flavoured with Hotel Artemis, the near-future hospital pastiche of that John Wick aspect). Mac finds he can’t use his hands and has to impatiently tell people what to do (which previously he had no problem with doing, though I guess anxiety and frustration will do that). Letting the real world into the show, there’s a quarantine episode that begins amusingly with Mac getting very bored, but inevitably they have to break quarantine, the least interesting development (probably a bad example frankly, though I’m not sure that taking your lead from a TV show about a guy who improvises explosives from household items is a good idea in any case).

It ends as it started I suppose, an entertaining adventure TV show reboot, our heroes not an actual paramilitary deathsquad which is a nice change both for interesting problems to solve and to reduce the number of people being killed on screen. No, they stick to burglary, kidnapping, hacking, blowing things up and stealing and repurposing equipment. Will anyone ever realise that locking up MacGyver doesn’t work? Apparently not now the show's done, in my mind every week since then bad guys are locking him in their storage room without emptying it first and regretting it after the next ad-break.

Watch This: It’s fun, there’s explosions, the show recognises the moral contradictions even if it never confronts or resolves them
Don’t Watch This: Old Mac forever, new Mac never

5. The Flight Attendant

Cassie is a flight attendant who, against the rules, gets drunk and flirts with Alex, the guy in 3C on the flight to Bangkok. She goes on a date with him, gets blackout drunk and wakes up next to him, his throat cut. Panicking, she tidies up and runs for it.

This spirals out of control, with the FBI picking up the case at one remove from the Thai police, the family being involved in weapon smuggling, a mysterious woman called Miranda and more. On top of this are Cassie’s efforts to figure out what happened on her own, this putting a strain on her best friend Annie, a high-powered lawyer, her more surface friendships with other flight attendants, and her brother and family coming to town and his memories of her alcoholic father being very different to hers. This ties in with her having hallucinations, mostly conversations with the murdered Alex, mostly in the hotel room.

There are glossy locations and slick split screen and montage sections, slightly retro, trying to make us think of Hitchcock and Film Noir. Perhaps the cleverest bits are practical effects, such as when Cassie opens the curtains in her hallucinated hotel room to find herself looking through the window into the interview room where the FBI are questioning her.

The slickness and pace and revelations cover the flaws, which is just as well as there are a couple of gaping ones. There are several coincidences that I puzzled over, trying to have them add up. No, it turns out there was a wild lot of confusing intrigue going on before Alex ever got on the plane. Cassie at the end has given up the booze and reconciled with almost everyone she’s hurt and been cleared, got her job back and even been offered a new role, a happy ending which takes it out of noir. Some bad people got punished and the good people got away (mostly) unscathed. Anyway, fun.

Watch This: Clever, slick, out of her depth crime thriller with some good laughs
Don’t Watch This: Air travel isn’t glamorous, nor is crime, it’s just annoying

6. Annika

I thought this new crime show seemed familiar and it is an adaption of a Radio Four drama I've occasionally caught a few minutes of. Annika is a newly promoted Detective Inspector of Police Scotland’s Marine Homicide Unit, investigating deaths at sea. She’s also originally Norwegian, a single mum and she likes to make long monologues, linking the current case to various literary works. This comes across as more quirky than pretentious, though some of that too.

The murders themselves manage to mix high concept and low; people found in the water or mysteriously on boats lead them through Norse culture (Annika of course has Norwegian parents), sophisticated online scams, tabloid academic exposés, and (of course) water sources. Each of the team have slightly complex lives, though Annika and her daughter who is having trouble at the new school take most of personal drama focus.

Is there room for another high concept, gorgeously shot, quirky detective police procedure? Well there is for this one.

Watch This: For complicated crimes from weird angles, kept grounded and occasionally very funny
Don’t Watch This: If I want Scandi-noir I can get it from actual Scandinavia

7. SWAT

The cop shows have been wrestling with Black Lives Matter and other events. SWAT had a head start on this; in the first episode of the rebooted series the white SWAT team leader accidentally shot a black teenager while in hot pursuit. He resigned and Hondo, fully-qualified, not the most senior officer, and black, was made team leader. Meanwhile the female Latina captain (who left the show at the end of Season 2) had been working on a police reform plan.

Because this is a show about gunfights, fistfights, foot chases, car chases, stunts and tense negotiations, the recurring bad guys for this season are the Imperial Dukes a white supremacist organisation. It becomes personal when they kill a SWAT officer. She is, of course, in another team; the show will sideline the teammates (Luca is away in Germany on an exchange program for several episodes*) but never permanently. In fact it’s one of the show’s more annoying features, they bring in interesting side characters, build them up and then let them go.

They also attempt to tackle racism within the police, and Deacon starts to befriend a new recruit to SWAT (in another team again). He complains about wokeness and police criticism, which Deacon has sympathy for as a good cop being lumped in but then slowly realises he is using coded white nationalist language. After some hesitation he gathers evidence. The board of review gets racists reassigned, as the union pulls out all the stops for them, and afterwards other cops are hostile to him. This isn’t good enough for Hondo who takes some steps that make him even more unpopular, and also raise tensions with the “Black Justice Now” activists.

Which is not to say that it isn’t awkward. In the first episode Hondo, struggling with the conflict between his communities, and his identities, takes the knee with his politically active father and Darryl, the teenage son of an old friend he’s looking after. He’s looking after him because the old friend was in a gang and was in prison. He gets out on parole and he and Hondo clash again and again. (Hondo is carefully placed to be mostly right in these arguments).

And every time there’s exciting fights against very bad people, who SWAT are the last line of defence against.

Watch This: Action cop show trying to deal with issues
Don’t Watch This: TV can’t solve intractable problems

* They claim he can’t get back because of COVID quarantine and I did wonder if he wasn’t on set because of that.

8. Hitmen: Reloaded

Fran and Jamie are still hitmen, now working for the mysterious Mr V, and in line to go international with a job in Japan lined up. In this series they go to a school reunion. Jamie is being evicted from her flat and her old friend – best friend before Fran arrived at the school – Kat, now a successful self help author, lets her stay.

Kat worms her way into Jamie’s life to Fran’s annoyance. Jamie is slightly less epically stupid, making for a better show, with the best jokes still coming from them messing up their hits and having slapstick chases and fights. In possibly the best one they accidentally kill their target before a drug deal has been done and hire an actor to take his place, and he gets too much into the role.

Watch This: Some fun black humour
Don’t Watch This: Murdering people isn’t funny