TNT Brings the Best of Cops, Scripted and Unscripted
Another day in Southland is another day perhaps made by a sour, ungrateful public or, more likely, freak havoc from out of nowhere.
The police drama known for its jittery camera work and its stressed-out officers returns for its fifth season this Wednesday, February 13 at 10 p.m. ET on TNT. In two weeks, (Wednesday, February 27, 9 p.m. ET) TNT rolls out a new police reality series, Boston's Finest, which has the banality of real police work, but surprisingly no less the drama than its fictional cousin.
With every ilk of fantastical procedural detective drama out there, Southland has always felt real. Although mainly about beat cops, it's in the style of its street detective predecessors Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire and its 1967 grandaddy N.Y.P.D. (starring the late, great Jack Warden).
As difficult as your commute and mortgage might be, so it goes for the Southland characters. Officers Sammy Bryant (Shawn Hatosy) and Ben Sherman (Ben McKenzie) (left) are often ultra-critical of each other, but still maintain working respect in the field. Detective Lydia Adams (Regina King) has a newborn baby and now struggles as a sleep-deprived single mom.
And Alpha-dog Officer John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz, top photo, left) is breaking in yet another new recruit (they verbally haze the newbies as "boots") but is approaching retirement and looks to be mellowing a slight bit, taking it down a notch from his usual Robocop routine.
Cooper waxes philosophical to a new recruit, "Treat it like a circus. All of it. If it starts to get to you — 'Circus'… I haven't gone postal yet."
C. Thomas Howell also returns in another comic run as cut-up and squad-room clown Officer Dewey Dudek. He's a wily veteran, but an annoying smart-aleck who alienates almost everyone but Cooper.
Howell's banter, and the often coarse slang of the other cops in Southland, rivals Justified as an example of a series that creates a world set in its own rhythm of language. That, combined with its ultra-compact editing, moves it forward in quick, hard-hitting chunks, and it's this construction that takes maximum advantage of television as a medium.
While never reaching the hard-boiled, sucker-punch mayhem of Southland, Boston's Finest is no less compelling to watch. It's in the style of Terrance Wrong's 2012 NY Med, a reality series that showed real hospital surgeons and nurses on the job, and a bit of their personal lives to round out the full picture.
Co-produced by South Boston native, and New Kids on the Block alumni Donnie Wahlberg, the series follows gang units, fugitive units and patrol cops (such as officer Jenn Penton, top photo and left). Sometimes they're doing the drudgery, and sometimes they're getting shot at, and it's this straddling of the ordinary and dangerous that refreshingly strives to make it everything that smarmy, semi-staged reality shows like Cops are not.
Says Wahlberg in a TNT press clip (and who knows a few thing about celluloid cops, having played several and is currently starring in the CBS police drama Blue Bloods), "A lot of networks had approached me about doing a show about the Boston Police Department, but they wanted shows about guys kicking down doors and beating people over the head ... we're focusing on human beings and what goes beyond the police work and makes these people tick. What is it that drives them to do the job that they do?" (Penton's story is particularly compelling and is as absorbing as any spun out of the writer's room.)
Boston's Finest is a worthy addition to the record of law and order as it locates itself on the everyday normal streets — streets that can quickly and absurdly become dangerous. One moment the police have to approach cars on traffic stops with drivers they know have warrants out on them. Then it's off to pick up the kids at day care. No drama there, but it's with a gun in the holster, and that's some cognitive dissonance most of us cannot appreciate.
Kudos to TNT for taking these police genres and bringing something more, something smart to both.