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...

“I don’t know if you noticed, Marjory, but the criminal fraternity sometimes engage in practices call pretending and lying…”

By Russel D McLean

Please, if you have not seen all of Life on Mars (UK) or Ashes to Ashes, prepare for possibly very deep spoilers to both shows.



I admit that last Thursday’s finale to the Life on Mars sequel/spin-off Ashes to Ashes was possibly the best episode they did for the entire run. Everyone at the top of their game, and some interesting stuff going on. But it suffered, as the whole series has, from a sense of being quite superfluous to requirements. No amount of dramatic handwaving or metaphysical revelations could distract from the fact that, as an extension of Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes was unnecessary.

Unless, of course, you wanted all the answers.

One of the things that I adored about Life on Mars – aside from the fact that it turned out to be one of the best British cop shows in years – was the fact that it drip fed you its metaphysical meanderings. And, in the end, it left you wondering what really happened, whether you saw what you thought you did and if so, what did it all mean? I can remember the excited discsussions at work and at home. With friends.

All of us disagreeing, pointing to plot threads and images that backed up our arguments. All of our opinions were valid, and in the end, that emotional connection really made the show.

I can also, honestly, say I’ve never wept quite like I did at the end of Life on Mars. Sam’s “leap of faith,” while I contended it not to necessarily have been suicide, was heartbreaking especially as, for a split second, you did not know what was coming. You still asked the questions:

Was he mad?
In a coma?
Back in time?

You didn’t know for sure.

But you had your suspicions.

It stayed with me for a long time, that ending, and even watching the show back this year, I choked up as Sam was forced to choose between 2006 and 1973 even though I knew what was coming and even though I knew by this time that Ashes to Ashes had stated, categorically, that Sam Tyler committed suicide.

In fact, that was one of the things that annoyed me intensely in year one of Ashes to Ashes (aside from the eighties setting; sorry, but the seventies were much cooler, in fashion, music and cop shows). With DI Drake’s insistence that she was in a coma and everything was a figment of her imagination, the drama was sucked out of the situation. The stakes were lesser. And even if they did give Drake a daughter to go back to (Sam had a girlfriend, but no real connections in 2006), I’ll say that quite honestly, I didn’t care whether she made it back to Molly or not. That dramatic impetus, that tension, was sucked out of the show, because everyone seemed so confident about the facts.

There was also another twist that I realised upon a viewing of Life on Mars a couple of years later. In the original show, we never left Tyler’s point of view. Every scene was either inclusive of Sam or a flashback as Sam was being told what happened by another character. In Ashes to Ashes, and this become more prevalent as the series continued its run, we would leave Drake’s point of view to join other characters outside of her knowledge. Of course this led the viewer to believe in the reality of the other characters, but again robbed the series of ambiguity and interpretation. Of course, in the end, we discovered that what we’d really been watching all along was The Gene Hunt Show, but then that always seemed to be the intention behind Ashes to Ashes, moving a brilliant supporting character up to lead and perhaps taking away some of what made him quite so compelling in the first place.

Where Life on Mars had been about mystery, about questioning the nature of the show, Ashes to Ashes tended to take the viewer by the hand – perhaps, again, a nod to eighties television and storytelling. The series was all about answering the very questions that had made Life on Mars so addictive, and while I’m sure many viewers wanted that, I was quite happy to have an open-endedness to the show; a sense that the answers were to be found if we wanted them to be found.

What we got with Life on Mars was emotional closure.

Ashes to Ashes provided a mythological closure. But I didn’t even come close to tears this time around. And I wanted to. I had been watching for three years, enjoying most of what I saw but never feeling the same urgency and excitement I had felt with the original show.

For my money, I’ll take the emotional closure over the mythological one. The honest, raw and even upsetting ideas bandied about in the final moments of Life on Mars affected me more than the revelation of an Afterlife, which we could have extrapolated from clues in the earlier series. Throw in an insane performance from a character who was clearly signposted as The Devil, and you realise that the show is Grandstanding big-time, making sure that everyone understands what’s going on, leaving no one in doubt as to anything.

There were no phone-calls, emails, disagreements following the end of Ashes to Ashes.

But there was much to enjoy through the run of Ashes to Ashes, despite its feeling of being quite superfluous. Gene Hunt was always worth watching, even if they softened him up for the second series (he was often genuinely terrifying in Life on Mars, his bigotry entrenched and less cartoon-like than in the second show) and foolishly tried to make him a romantic lead of sorts (sorry, but I never bought the Hunt/Drake thwarted romance line). In fact, the main cast were usually engaging (I never had a problem with Keeley Hawes as Alex Drake, even though early criticisms of the show seemed to point to her) and never put in less than their all. I even rather liked the character of Jim Keats who came into season trhee as a “discipline and complaints” officer, but I was rather upset to see his portrayal disintegrate in the final episode as his evil machinations came to light. Pull it down a notch, he would have been terrifying. But all that hissing, laughing and talking in tongues (not to mention the Hell Express elevator which anyone in their right mind would have walked away from) took away any terror from the character’s revelations and intentions, relegating him to cliché of the week, something that stunted Life on Mars through all three seasons (again, I could put this down to its eighties pop culture roots).

By overtly stating everything that Life on Mars implied, the series ultimately lost me. I like to figure things out. Maybe I’m a rare viewer in that sense, but I like to let my TV shows make me do a bit of work. Not necessarily all the work all the time, but I like to be able to figure stuff out rather than have all the dramatic points handed to me on a plate.

All the same, its strange to think we’ll not be seeing Gene Hunt on our screens again. With his performance throughout both series, Philip Glenister certainly created an original, often inspired and eminently quotable character.

And certainly, his last insult of the series (thrown at a Dutch drug dealer whose gang had just shot up Gene’s beloved Audi Quattro) did give me cause for a grin: “You murdered my car, you dyke-digging tosspot!”

No matter what else, the Gene Genie never lost his way with words…