I Watch TV: Pretty Hard Cases

 

Pretty Hard Cases

The Toronto cops are back. As the Guns And Gangs unit they are investigating drugs being smuggled into the city and also a gunshot detector that keeps getting spoofed by fireworks, until after another false callout a cop is shot. (Inevitably in this comedy-crime drama whose B-plots revolve around relationships, this is the on-again-off-again girlfriend of one of the male sidekick detectives). This propels them into investigating the drug gangs, who have formed a coalition called the Coyotes [Coyote hand gesture]. Trying to figure out who is behind all this is the main throughline of the season.

But it’s the setpieces that really make this show stand out. Kelly and Sam go undercover as flight attendants in the first episode, leading to a variety of comic scenes in the airport. This culminates in them having to chase their target, all three in pencil skirts and high heels. Genuinely good combination of police-show-excitement and farcical slapstick comedy.

This does sometimes seem dissonant as the show plunges directly into dark crimes, when someone gets murdered, or when one of them is kidnapped. A boss comes into town and one of the male sidekick detectives who is undercover is spotted and tortured in a warehouse – tortured by having golf balls hit at him by the golf-fanatic boss. This is a good high-concept villain scene, but when we whiplash between comedy and gritty crime it mean swe have a camp, whimsical golf-torture that inflicts real pain and violence on a character we’ve come to appreciate, and leads to a sequence where people get killed.

Anyway, it’s good crime, and it’s good police and it’s good intrigue and there’s some good jokes, even if the tone doesn’t always seem coherent. Without giving too much away, the whole girlboss-on-both-(all?)-sides-of-the-law theme continues, though rather than seeing one villain’s eye view, we instead follow one at a time who changes every couple of episodes, as well as some minor, younger characters who keep getting caught up in bad events.

Watch This: A police show that combines sitcom-antics and gritty drug gangs and corruption
Don’t Watch This: You don’t want to mix crime and jokes