In the world of the police procedural, there are action shows and there are talking shows. Homicide, particularly in its first, best few years, was as great a talking show as the genre has ever seen, and one that posited that cops like Pembleton (Andre Braugher), Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson), John Munch (Richard Belzer), and Kay Howard (Melissa Leo) would be just as good at talking outside the interrogation room as inside it.
So, yes, they were sensational at coercing confessions out of killers who had foolishly wandered into what they referred to as “the Box.” They were so exciting in this area, in fact, that the show could be even more satisfying on those occasions when they failed—like the episode-length interrogation of “Three Men and Adena,” which offered a frustrating end to the first murder investigated by Pembleton’s young partner Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor)—as when they closed the deal.
But they could also hold the viewer spellbound talking about almost nothing at all, whether it was Steve Crosetti (Jon Polito) and his Lincoln assassination conspiracy theories, or Munch suffering the withering disdain of his revered partner Stan Bolander (Ned Beatty), or the entire squad uniting in their dislike of the haughty Pembleton.
Pembleton had reason to be haughty. In an ensemble show filled with more recognizable actors, it was Braugher’s face, and voice, that quickly became the most important. Half of the abbreviated second season is devoted to the murder of a drug dealer, in which Pembleton suspects a police-involved shooting, while shift commander Alphonse “Gee” Giardello (Yaphet Kotto) pushes him to look for a civilian suspect to protect the shield. Indignant and deeply hurt at his mentor for letting him down, Pembleton decides to prove a point by hauling one of the victim’s innocent friends into the Box and verbally twisting him up like a pretzel until the weeping man is grateful for the opportunity to confess to a crime he didn’t commit. It’s a virtuoso performance and one the creative team rewarded by opening the following season with a three-parter where Pembleton’s Catholic education proved instrumental in catching a serial killer. The character became so important to the show, and so powerful, that the writers eventually had to give Frank a mild stroke just to humble him and keep Braugher interested.
That Homicide always had at least three African American cast members at any one time, plus several other recurring actors of color playing cops up and down the ranks, meant the series could casually do something unheard of at the time: put multiple black characters together in scenes, featuring no white characters, that had nothing to do with race. The show certainly dealt with racial issues—even prejudice within the black community, like a story where the dark-complected Gee laments being rejected by a lighter-skinned woman—but its characters didn’t have to be defined by them.
The show’s depiction of police work as work was equally sophisticated. Better than any cop drama before it, Homicide captured the world-weariness and emotional armor that come with the job. The characters and many of the early stories were drawn from Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, a nonfiction book by Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon. Simon made his entree into television by cowriting (with David Mills) season 2’s “Bop Gun,” in which a grieving husband and father (guest star Robin Williams) is disgusted to hear the detectives investigating his wife’s murder cracking jokes and boasting of the overtime they’ll earn on it; Gee explains to him that this is how they all have to think in order to function, and some are just better at hiding it than others.
That attitude, the deliberately jarring filming style (early episodes were shot under harsh light with frequent jump cuts), and a cast full of craggy middle-aged men made Homicide perhaps the most uncommercial show to ever debut after the Super Bowl. Viewers who had just watched the Cowboys rout the Bills were treated to a weirdly philosophical cop drama that opened with Crosetti and Lewis in a dark alley searching for a shell casing, with Crosetti musing, “You never really find what you’re looking for, because the whole point is looking for it. So if you find it, it defeats its own purpose.”
NBC executives would spend the next six years chasing a wider audience for Homicide, never quite understanding that looking for it defeated the show’s own purpose. Though the series ran a healthy seven seasons, it lived on the cancellation bubble for most of them, and grew flashier and less realistic with each passing year. The filming style got prettier, and so did the cast: Lewis began the series partnered with the stocky, bald Crosetti, and ended it teamed with Michael Michele as beauty queen–turned–cop Rene Sheppard. The mundane murders and murderers of the early seasons never entirely went away, but now they had to compete for screen time with charismatic drug lords, precinct shoot-outs, even a helicopter chase. In its later years, Homicide was a talking show that kept trying to convince itself it could be an action show even though the best moments were still the small ones. Erik Todd Dellums was certainly charismatic as local kingpin Luther Mahoney, but Miami Vice and other more visceral cop shows had already covered this territory far better than Homicide could hope to, whereas few shows could pull off a scene as darkly comic as Munch and Bolander convincing a dumb witness that their copy machine is a lie detector emitting so much radiation that prolonged exposure leads to “an 11 percent chance of penile stustification.”
Meldrick Lewis once laid out the challenges of the job by explaining, “Murderers lie cuz they got to, witnesses lie cuz they think they got to, and everyone else lies for the sheer joy of it.”
There was a lot of joy to be found in watching these clever cops talk liars into telling the truth, even if things rarely ended as neatly as they wanted them to.
—AS
Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, 2003–2009) Total score: 89
Developed by Ronald D. Moore (who worked on three Star Trek spin-offs), this reboot of the 1978 Glen A. Larson Star Wars rip-off was initially greeted with suspicion by fans of the original. But it used its derivative and silly source as a jumping-off point for a dark-and-gritty reboot, and reconceived almost everything about it, except for its basic story and settings: Humans in a distant galaxy are almost wiped out in a sneak attack by the Cylons, a race of intelligent machines, and the handful of survivors are forced to flee across the cosmos in search of a new homeworld. The titular military vessel’s commander, William Adama, formerly played by Bonanza’s silver-haired patrician Anglo, Lorne Greene, was incarnated by pockmarked Mexican American character actor Edward James Olmos, while the hotshot fighter pilot Starbuck, portrayed by Dirk Benedict in the original series, was now played by actress Katee Sackhoff. Fanboy pushback went away when viewers saw the breadth and depth of this reimagined space opera, which treated the first line of the original’s opening narration—“What if life here began out there?”—as the beginning of a deliriously ambitious TV epic that owed as much to Homer, the Talmud, the Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita as it did to George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry.
The revised Galactica’s somberness was well-suited to the political debates of the early aughts. The show burst onto the airwaves in 2003 as a miniseries, two years and three months after the 9/11 attacks, while the US military was fighting a global war against terrorism, taking over Afghanistan and Iraq, rolling back domestic privacy rights in the name of security, valorizing the military to an extent not seen since World War II, and advocating torture as a valid intelligence-gathering tool. BSG dealt with all of these issues and more, starting with the miniseries, which showed human homeworlds scorched by nuclear sneak attacks. The crew and passengers of the Galactica and its fleet (including Mary McDonnell’s cancer-stricken President Laura Roslin, formerly the secretary of education) make brutally expedient choices about whom to save and whom to abandon, and debate whether to devote their remaining resources to fighting the Cylons or traveling across space to find a prophesied home.
The show never stints on scenes of brutal close-quarters combat and outer-space dogfights, which, like the show’s conversations, sex scenes, and official pageantry, are captured with handheld (or handheld-seeming) cameras. BSG has a knack
for following large numbers of overlapping, ongoing story lines, including Adama’s thorny relationship with his fighter pilot son, Lee “Apollo” Adama (Jamie Bamber), and the twisted sexual relationship between the traitorous scientist and future political leader Gaius Baltar (James Callis) and his Cylon handler, Number Six (Tricia Helfer), a curvy blond apparition who slinks through his mind like a femme fatale version of Harvey the rabbit.
BSG is less interested in plot-driven serialized storytelling than in making audiences see themselves in more than one mirror at once, and challenging them to ask who they’re rooting for, and why. In some ways, Moore’s Galactica’s biggest screen influence was The Twilight Zone, which likewise plays tricks with perception, revealing that what we assumed was Mars was actually Nevada, that what we describe as “beautiful” could be “ugly” when seen through different eyes, or that the real monsters are on Maple Street. The show’s humans are polytheists, like the “pagans” despised by previous generations of Westerners, while the ruthless machines worship one god that seems to have Christian characteristics. The memorable New Caprica arc from Galactica’s midpoint, which placed members of the show’s core cast on a planet occupied by Cylons, put viewers in the position of rooting for insurgents who were at that very moment waging guerrilla warfare against US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. The series finale, a brain twister that caused more consternation than any finale since the end of Lost, folded aspects of the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, and Chariots of the Gods into a cosmic finale partially scored to a cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” What the hell?
Yes—what the hell; as in, why not. Even when the show seemed on the verge of vanishing into its own navel, it was hard not to admire its commitment to its peculiar vision, and its seeming disinterest in doing what fans wanted or expected. The chintzy original Galactica was a heroic melody played on a rusty squeeze-box; Moore’s was an alternately mournful and dissonant symphony performed by an orchestra, chock-full of narrative, structural, and thematic flourishes that subverted sci-fi clichés, upended viewer sympathies, and endlessly revisited fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human? Is it a biological condition or a moral one? Can intelligent machines lay claim to the status and moral rights of biological humans? If humans created the Cylons, Frankenstein-style, does it follow that wiping them out, even in self-defense, is tantamount to parents murdering their children? Can a democratically elected civilian authority be trusted to guide a society that’s endangered by a ruthless enemy bent on extermination, or should citizens place their trust in the military? Is torture a necessary part of war, or sadism indulged under the guise of survival? Is one form of religion more valid than another? Is there a God? An afterlife? A world beyond what we can sense? Can prophecies come true? Did life here begin out there?
—MZS
In Treatment (HBO, 2008–2010) Total score: 89
In one of the final episodes of In Treatment, psychiatrist hero Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) gets exasperated with Sunil (Irrfan Khan), a patient who has taken advantage of their working relationship, particularly after Sunil refers to Paul as his good friend.
“I meant to be your therapist, not your good friend!” Paul insists.
“Is it not possible to be both at once?” Sunil suggests. “Because you, you have certainly given me that impression.”
This is why Paul Weston is both a wonderful therapist and a terrible one, and perhaps the only kind of man who could have been placed at the center of In Treatment, a narratively audacious, emotionally riveting TV experiment.
Based on the Israeli series Be’Tipul, the show was formatted unlike any American TV drama before or since: five half-hour episodes a week (reduced to four for the third and final season), each one more or less covering the entirety of a therapy session between Paul and one of his patients, followed at the end of the week by Paul visiting his own shrink (Dianne Wiest’s Gina for the first two years, Amy Ryan’s Adele for the third) to discuss both how he feels about his patients and the many problems he’s enduring in his own life.
(The show’s format, and HBO’s attempt to allow the audience to access episodes as many ways as possible—making episodes available On Demand even before they’d aired, scheduling it differently across multiple channels—presaged today’s binge-viewing culture, though In Treatment’s audience was tiny no matter how you measured it.)
Most fiction has to heighten the dramatic realities of a profession for narrative and dramatic convenience. Viewers wouldn’t want to see a show about young lawyers in a big firm who spent all their time writing briefs, and a show where an ordinary therapist sat and calmly listened to patients go on about their familiar problems would have been even more audience-repelling than the show’s actual format. Those who tuned in did so because it was a show featuring an extraordinary doctor, in ways both good and bad, helping patients in extreme situations: a naval aviator (Blair Underwood’s Alex) who inadvertently bombed a school, a college student (Alison Pill’s April) refusing to get her cancer treated, a CEO (John Mahoney’s Walter) in the midst of a career-ending scandal, a teen gymnast (Mia Wasikowska’s Sophie) insisting she didn’t recently attempt suicide, and so on.
And they tuned in because Paul’s approach was so confrontational, so active, and—perhaps because his personal life was an ongoing wreck throughout the series—so very much blurring the line between therapist and friend, as Sunil noted in their final meeting. The very first patient the show presents is Laura (Melissa George), who becomes sexually attracted to Paul, and vice versa, even as he insists that their feelings are emotional transference gone awry. But we see that Paul puts too much of himself into relationships with all his patients, unwittingly playing would-be lover, or father (the one constant of the series is how good he is with younger patients), or buddy. At times, this has enormous value, like his willingness to personally take April to chemo when all other attempts at persuasion have failed. At others, he gets so close that the therapeutic relationship just can’t continue, or so that someone like Sunil—a Bengali widower desperate to be exiled back to his homeland rather than live in misery with his assimilated son and white daughter-in-law—can take advantage of him.
But Paul could also challenge them, and be challenged in turn by his own therapists, whether his emotionally thorny weekly dance with former mentor Gina or his fumbling in the darkness with total stranger Adele. TV loves what critic Daniel Fienberg calls a Vocational Irony Narrative, and rarely was a physician’s difficulty in healing, or even diagnosing, himself as acute or poignant as here.
“It’s not about you, Paul,” Gina tries to warn him at one point. “They’re human beings. They’re struggling with profound problems. If only you could find courage to sit with the fact that what we do is hard, and sometimes it makes you feel like an idiot. It’s a humbling profession, and if you lack anything as a therapist, it’s humility.”
None of this would have worked without a performer as committed, as tireless, and as good at reacting to his costars as Gabriel Byrne. He and lead director Paris Barclay turned each episode into a tight two-character play, where the silences—say, Paul trying to contain his anguish at hearing the tragic details of Walter’s childhood—were often as powerful as the speeches being delivered by his amazing scene partners. The second year in particular is one of the greatest TV drama seasons ever, with nary a weak link in casting, character, or episode.
Even with Be’Tipul stories and characters to adapt for the first two seasons, making the show proved so exhausting that its head writer changed each year: Rodrigo Garcia in the first (he also directed many of the early episodes), Warren Leight (who put so much of himself into it that he hasn’t watched a minute of it since leaving) in the second, and Dan Futterman and Anya Epstein in the third. By that last year, the show was running on fumes a bit, with the patients’ problems, and Paul’s reactions to them, inevitably echoing therapeutic relationships from seasons past. Paul had threatened to quit therapy (both the giving
and the taking of it) at the end of each of the previous seasons, but it felt more final this time, even though HBO didn’t officially cancel the show for several months after the last episode aired.
“I need to stop,” he told Adele, plainly and simply, before disappearing into a busy crowd of New York pedestrians. By then, we could understand why. A more stable, less emotionally raw and invested therapist might have been able to keep going, but he wouldn’t have been nearly as fascinating to watch.
—AS
South Park (Comedy Central, 1997–present) Total score: 89
Are South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone America’s greatest and most consistently inventive humorists, or only in the top 5? We’ll see, but the smart money is on the duo’s receiving a Kennedy Center honor before their show turns twenty-five and then pantomime jamming the trophies into each other’s asses before the director can cut to a commercial. In longevity as well as consistency of vision, they have few equals. Their closest rivals might be The Simpsons, a landmark show that started to flag halfway into its (similarly) endless run, and Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy, whose series has its moments but has never risen to the heights of conceptually driven insanity that Parker and Stone reach without breaking a sweat. At their best, this show about the continuing misadventures of Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, the repeatedly killed and resurrected Kenny McCormick, and the kids’ parents, teachers, and classmates can stand tall beside some of the giants of chaotic absurdism: Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (Airplane!), Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, the Marx Brothers, George Carlin, and W. C. Fields.
TV (The Book) Page 21