Watching the Detectives (and the crooks)

By Russel D McLean

Rewatching The Sopranos of late has got me thinking about crime fiction and television. Crime is a great source of drama, and crime shows are among some of the most popular scripted shows that people watch on the box. At their most basic, they are crime of the week shows, at their most complex they become  stories as much about their time and place as they do about providing that vicarious thrill of watching bad things happen without the consequences affecting our lives. Here are my top 10 crime shows and the reasons they work.

10 - Crime Story

This was the show that really introduced the world to ex Chicago cop Dennis Farina. Made in the 80s, it was set in the 60s and faced off Farina's cop against an up and coming mobster first in Chicago and later in Vegas. The first season was stunning, with memorable guest stars (including a young David Caruso, Pam Grier and Miles Davis) and an ending that left the viewer slack jawed. The second season stumbled, but perhaps this was because no one thought they'd be back. Yes, its a little disjointed in an 80's way, but it was one of the first shows to really try and create an arc for its characters and for the most part that first season stands out as a trailblazing template for modern crime dramas.

9 -Life on Mars (UK)

John Simm was the lead, but the star of the show was Philip Glenister as DCI Gene Hunt. A TV show about a modern cop travelling back to the un-PC seventies sounded daft, but somehow everything about this series came together in exactly the right way. It only lasted for two seasons, and that ending resulted in a number of debates about what actually happened, and if the producers had been smart that's the way things would have stayed. Sadly they made a sequel set in the 80s which made Gene the lead and provided a few dissapointingly definitive answers that really negated the power of the original show. But LoM was one of the finest British dramas of its time, and the crime drama aspects of its scripts were rarely less than compelling, drawing great paralells between what Britain was and what it had become.

8 - OZ

 This prison drama was frequently unsettling, massively melodramatic and never less than utterly compelling (although frequently, one would feel the need for a long shower after watching: this was one disturbing show, not for the easily offended). There were no good guys - the best you could find was amorality - and the violence was frequently shocking and unexpected. Adibissi ranks as one of the most memorably terrifying characters of all time, even if his little hat defied the laws of physics. Brave, bold, a show that tried to ask tough questions about the penal system and even if it all got a little surreal (the musical episode was both brilliant and head scratching), and occasionally too focussed on the horrific violence inside a max security pen, there's no denying that it was hugely powerful and often debate provoking television.

7 -Braquo

I love french crime dramas. The ones they make for the movies, anyway. Their TV has been more hit and miss until a little show called Spiral (Engrenages) came along and paved the way for a new way of looking at cop shows. Written by an ex cop, Braquo took the baton offered by Spiral and ran with it. Its a show about corrupt cops, about good people doing bad things, about how power can corrupt. Its a show with a spiky edge to it. And its utterly compelling. If you haven't seen it, seek it out, now. I'm just about to hit season 2 and I can't wait...

6- Homicide

Homicide at number 6? Oh someone's going to lynch me for this. Homicide was a brilliant, brilliant show. But it was interesting how its early grittiness (the first season was based quite closely on David Simon's brilliant Baltimore reportage) gave way to a cleaner cop drama that nevertheless retained its bite with some great central performances. I still think killing John Polito was a mistake, but luckily the show continued to impress with a career defining role for Richard Belzer (his character, John Munch, has now appeared on around a dozen other shows including, bizarrely, Sesame Street) and the constant presence of the brilliant Yahpett Koto as the squad commander. And of course, there was always  A brilliant show, even 

5 - Justified

Based on my favourite Elmore Leonard creations - US Marshall Raylan Givens - Justified had a strong first season that really grabbed me. Mostly it was the cool moments cribbed from Leonard's own writing, but it was also something in Timothy Oliphant's turn as Givens that grabbed me. Then Season 2 came along, turned everything on its head, ensured that this was a drama that was about more than just solving a crime. It became a show about families, about what they mean to us. And it quickly became one of the best goddamn shows I'd seen in a long time. Effortlessly cool, and unexpectedly smart, Justified is absolutely brilliant television.

4 - Spiral

The show that changed French TV for the better is a labarynthe, complex series that owes a huge debt to America's THE WIRE in the way that it mixes procedural machinations with a cynical examination of the justice system in modern Paris. The cops are flawed human beings, the judges are subject to their own failings and the criminals are often far more complex than we might at first assume. Every season works in its own story arc, but threads that you thought long gone soon re-emerge when you least expect them. This is appointment TV at its finest, and crime drama with a brilliant coating of true French cool.

3 - NYPD Blue

This is the one that might get me in trouble as a lot of people do prefer Homicide to Blue. But frankly Blue is the show that really got gritty first. Those first few seasons, where Andy Sipowicz was at his drop down drunk worst were compelling television as Blue presented cops who were every bit as human as the people on the mean streets they patrolled. And while, like Homicide, Blue got more comfortable in its later years, the creators acknowledged this by refocussing the show on Andy Sipowcz's evolution. And any show that can take the lead from early 90s sitcom Saved By The Bell and make him into a credible and - more importantly - a foil for Dennis Franz's powerhouse performance as Sipowicz deserves to be hailed as a classic.

2 - The Sopranos

The two and one slots are interchangeable in my book. The Sopranos is simply one of the greatest character studies ever committed to television. Tony Soprano is more than just a mob boss; he's a barometer of the times. He's all our worst instincts in one empathetic package, and even when he tries to do the right thing, its often in the wrong way. That any show can make us care for not only Tony but his wholly sociopathic crew is a minor miracle. But care we do, so much so that when that final shot aired, you could hear the collective gasps of nations of TV viewers who all took something different and personal from the meaning of those final moments.

1 - The Wire

After the dry run of Homicide and the HBO adaptation of The Corner, David Simons produced this incredible examination of the modern world wrapped up in the guise of a crime show. More than cops and robbers, The Wire was all about the evolution of a city, a microcosm of humanity on a larger scale. It was a show about injustices on small and grand scales. It was about how all our lives are determined by larger forces. It was about how we must recognise injustice to make any kind of chance. And it was about some of the most complex and most completely human cops ever put on television. The Wire was television as novel, and frankly, it reinvigorated the television cop show to remind us of the power of visual storytelling and how it can be as subtle and thought provoking as any straight prose.

For those wondering, there are shows I have missed. The Shield, for example, never really quite worked for me. Mostly down to Vic Mackey, a character who never really evolved over the show (although that may have been the point) and the fact that the show reveled a bit too much in its own over the top approach. I'm not denying its fans, but it never quite held together for me. Law and Order and CSI were all huge shows, but again they never worked for me in the same way that many of these shows did. And yes, I have a US bias, but its the same as in my reading that there's something about the US way with dialogue that always seems to work for me. Its a personal list, so feel free to disagree in the comments or remind me about the great goddamn TV crime shows I may have missed...

First Impressions

By Russel D McLean

This week, I have finally been indulging properly in the first seaosn of Boardwalk Empire, over a year after everyone else managed to see it. But, hey, I've never been one for keeping up with the zeitgeist.

What initially impressed me - before anyone uttered a word - was the incredible opening sequence. There was a feeling for a while that opening titles were going the way of the dodo. And after years of generically bland "introduce the characters" titles, a-la CSI, you could see why. A spot of soft rock. A bunch of shots of the main cast with their name underneath. Job done.

But opening titles, when done well, are masterpieces unto themselves and introduce you completely to the tone of the show. Boardwalk Empire's music is perhaps a little anachronistic, but the great, sweeping shots of all those bottles of booze and Buscemi on that beach are just brilliant




The opening credits of a TV show have to put you in the right frame of mind. In the case of Dexter, the juxtaposition of such odd shots of everyday life put you right into the mind of a central character who doesn't see life in the same way that we do. And of course all that blood (and keptchup) reminds you of the basic tent of the show, with Dexter being a blood spatter analyst moonlighting as a serial killer (or is that the other way round?):



But its not just the most recent shows that had great opening sequences. The opening credits of Crime Story, from the 1980's were quite brilliant, but then that show still has, in many ways, a massive influence on modern TV:





And of course, I won't post them all here, but THE WIRE, went a great stage further with its opening credits, changing them from season to season to highlight the different themes involved. By changing the artists recording the main title track, they managed to ensure that each season felt utterly different from the last and yet somehow connected:



I guess you could say that the opening credits of a TV show are something like the cover of a book: they are the first thing the reader/viewer sees, and they sure as hell have to give an idea of what the books are about. And while many of them are generic, those that are unique or truly inventive, tend to stick in the mind.

"Some will live and others die..."

It was my dad who awakened my love for crime fiction. He was the one who, for years, kept pushing this book called Mr Majestyk under my nose. Now, sure, the first Leonard novel I actually read was Get Shorty, but I like to think I came to the author because of my dad’s near fanatical love for his work (something which soon passed on to me).

I mention this because it was my dad who introduced me to a lot of great authors (and a lot of great music) as I got older. He had a kind of instinct for what I’d dig (and if my mum is to believed, its because we’re essentially the same person, but one of us has more grey in his beard).

Which is a roundabout way of telling you how this Christmas he got me Crime Story on DVD.

Crime Story, for those of you who don’t know, was a cult 80’s crime show starring Dennis Farina (and his ever brilliant moustache) as hair-trigger Chicago cop Michael Torrello. Which doesn’t sound too unique until you consider that what Mann and the show’s other creative forces were trying to do was tell a story over the course of a TV show.

Does that sound surprising?

In the pre-Wire world?

Hey, shouldn't all shows be doing that now?

In the eighties, of course, it just wasn’t something you did. You reset the show week after week to try and catch a new audience. You didn’t expect them to remember what had happened, didn’t expect them to cotton to changes in the characters.

This was the era, after all, that was to give us The A-Team.

All the same, Crime Story was ambitious for its era as it attempted to tell the dual story of Torrello’s obsession with catching criminal thug Ray Luca while at the same time detailing Luca’s rise to the top of the American Mafia (while never answering the question of how Luca’s hair so consistently defied gravity episode after episode).



Now, I’m a fan of Mann’s work but I’d never come across this show before, so I was intrigued to see it. Of course, I came in fully prepared for the limitations of 80’s network TV, and in some cases, I was right to prepare myself. There are some bizarre and unlikely resolutions to certain cases, and sometimes you can see the censors stepping in, but on the whole Crime Story is surprisingly gritty, particularly in its presentation of the Chicago Police Department of the 1960’s. Torrello and his boys get drunk, get laid, make mistakes, beat up on suspects, fly into rages and do all kinds of shit you just don’t expect from a network show of that era. Torrello himself is a particularly complex character and while you can chart Farrina’s finding his footing as an actor, he brings a kind of raw intensity to the role that works surprisingly well.

And then there’s the fact that the bad guys seem to get away most of the time with the shit they do. Sure, there are stand alone episodes like the TV killer that play out like a particularly dark version of almost any TV cop show, but when the focus is on Luca and Torrello’s back and forth, there’s a real sense of danger and that the balance of power could shift in either direction.

The show is packed to the brim with actors who were either already famous (the wondrous Pam Grier appears in a brilliant subplot that deals directly with racism and mixed-race relationships as well as the unique nature of the American “ghettos”) or would become so (David Caruso, Julia Roberts, Gary Sinise, Michael Madsen and Ving Rhames all pop up over the course of the show), and the sixties setting means the soundtrack is absolutely incredible, with particular love going to the title theme, Runaway, a song I’d heard before but never really appreciated.

But yes, there are problems. A mid season slump kicks in around Paul Guilfoyle’s appearance as a hostage-taking psychopath with a particularly implausible plot to sleepwalk through (it is one of the shows weakest episodes and nearly made me give up) while the plot recaps reach ludicrous proportions – nearly six minutes in one episode to get through the “previously on” while one particular mid-season episode is nothing more than a recap of the story so far. But then the show kicks back into high gear as it focuses on the Torrello/Luca dynamic and moves the action to Las Vegas. From there we get a string of brilliant episodes including a particularly surprising instalment which deals directly with a man raping his teenage daughter-in-law and does so in a way that deals with the issue as upfront as it possibly can given the restrictions of the time, and re-affirms Crime Story as the fore-runner to complex and gritty dramas such as Homicide and NYPD Blue and then, of course, The Sopranos and The Wire.

I’ve just kicked into the end of season one this evening, with a particular WTF moment on the very last disc. It’s an insane plot twist, I think, utterly out of left field (if you can avoid spoilers and haven’t seen the show before, it’ll really kick you in the nuts), but by this point I was so invested in the characters and the snaking arc of the show that I was just going with it, and trust me, I’ll be slipping season two into the player tomorrow.

Of course, if my agent’s reading this, only after I’m done with that work I should be doing…