Angels in Middle America
Hunter, right, with Laura San Giacomo. TNT
Holly Hunter's Saving Grace debuts on TNT tonight, and I'll be writing more later in the week, for the print magazine, on the new breed of female antiheroes represented by this show and Glenn Close's Damages, on FX starting tomorrow. Well, that is, I already wrote on this--you just won't be reading it until later, when the article hits newsstands. Because that's how we roll in print magazines. Late. We roll late.
As for the show itself, Saving Grace is a classic case of great performance, OK show. (This is true to an extent of Damages as well, but more on that tomorrow.) Hunter plays Oklahoma City cop Grace Hanadarko, who has a drinking problem, and a sleeping-with-married-guys problem (well, actually, she has little problem with it), and they all tie back to a guilt-because-my-sister-died-in-the-Oklahoma-City-bombing-because-I-missed-an-appointment problem. [Frequent commenter Keith: your homework is to report to us on how well the show gets OKC.] One night, she's driving home drunk from an outing and runs over a pedestrian, apparently killing him. Desperate, the unreligious Grace asks for God's help, and gets it, in the form of Earl (Leon Rippy), a tobacco-chewing angel who shows up to bust her (metaphorical) balls and offer her a shot a redemption, which she resists feistily.
Saving Grace hits a bit too heavily on the notes of quirkiness and uplift for my taste, but I admire what it's doing and how it tries to do it. It has a real clarity of vision, and distinctive voice: it's basically the story of Touched by an Angel, told with the language and sex of an FX show. Hunter is fabulous, selling Grace's unrepentant gusto and free-spiritedness with a saucy smile and a raspy, barrel-aged drawl.
It's the structure of the show that throws me: this is another one of those series which hedges its risks (getting people to invest in an unusual, serial story) with a very conventional structure (usually, as in this case, a meat-and-potatoes cop procedural). It bothers me--here, as with TNT's The Closer and Fox's upcoming K-Ville, among others--for two reasons. First, combining an ongoing story with the need to wrap up a crime in an hour tends to flatten the serial elements while ensuring that not enough time can be spent on the cases to make them especially interesting. Second, the whole business just feels too self-consciously like something that was dreamed up in a TV-network conference room, with a lot of talk of "closure," and "relatability" and "payoffs" for "less-engaged viewers."
Still, I'll probably keep following Grace for a while if only because of how well Hunter plays the character. She makes her encounters with Earl play like something from Angels in America; like Prior Walter's angelic run-ins, they're combative and oddly sexually charged, and Hunter plays the scenes with an off-balance near-drunkenness that fits both Grace's addictive character and the idea that the presence of holiness is literally intoxicating. Saving Grace the series has not won me over yet, but Hunter's performance so far is its--ah, but that's too obvious, isn't it?
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1
James,
Assignment accepted. There was an interesting piece in the local Sunday newspaper weekly TV program guide on Saving Grace. It seems that Hunter and the producers have been working closely with OCPD over the past year to capture at least the feel of the PD.
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2
One other note, many of the character names in Saving Grace are names of towns in Oklahoma. Hanadarko is a play on the town of Anadarko. There are others such as Stillwater, Yukon, Ada, etc. I'm just glad they stayed away from Slapout, Bugtussle, Gotebo and Bowlegs.
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3
Is it just me, or does Holly Hunter look about 16 years old in that picture? And I'm willing to bet Laura San Giacomo plays some kind of scientist in this show, because that's the only time actresses are allowed to wear thick nerdy glasses like that.
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4
It is the picture. If you've watched the promos, Holly is looking her age.
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5
Hmmmmmmm. What to say? Hmmmmmmm. I'm not sure I like it....yet. For me, there was little in Hunter's character to attract me and make me care about her. I guess that is the idea though. She is at the end of her rope and has one last chance to make amends.
I have difficulty watching San Giacomo speak with a drawl. Those of us with a real drawl can spot the fake from miles away. Hunter's real drawl melted my heart years ago.
Did they get Oklahoma City right? Not for me. Other than a very limited number of exterior shots such as the memorial site, the show is filmed in Los Angeles. I guess the fact that I've lived in OKC for 50 years worked against me for this show. For someone from New York, I'm sure it was a fairly accurate portrayal of what they think of Oklahoma. For me, the scenery looked nothing like what I see every day.
The look and feel was gritty. To be sure, there are "gritty" areas of OKC. I drive past the police station on a regular basis. It is a neat, clean, modern facility. I know a number of policemen including a homocide detective. The police and their surroundings in the show don't look like anything I know. But that is true with any show and the dramatic liscense needed to make a show interesting isn't it?
Some of the characters were a little too stereotypical. The ponytailed Native American detective and the rich cattleman were a little too much. But you have to remember that dramatic liscense thing again. How do you know you are in Oklahoma unless you have an Indian or a guy in a cowboy hat? Oh yeah, and cattle.
Another interesting thing to me was her brother being a Catholic priest. This is an odd choice for Oklahoma. There are 18 small Catholic churches and 2 Catholic high schools in OKC and over 500 Baptist Churches. Factor in all the other Protestant Evangelical Christian churchs in the city and Catholics look like an endangered species. If you are going to go with stereotypical, Grace's brother should have been a Baptist.
All in all, I hope the show makes it because I am a Holly Hunter fan and I do like to see shows with the setting something other than New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami, LA, etc. There really are people out here in middle America and we make up the bulk of the viewing audience. While it might surprise some folks, New York and LA are not the center of the universe.
Will I keep watching? I don't know. I'll give it a chance. But for me personally, I'll have to ignore that the setting is OKC since I don't recognize it in the show.
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6
First time comment-leaver. DVR'd the show and am anxious to see how well it does OKC. Too bad they didn't decide to film in Oklahoma. Part of what makes Friday Night Lights so great is that they film it on location around Austin, and the look of that show is part of what makes it so authentic.
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I wasn't too surprized that her brother was a Catholic priest. Rather, how did he get a New York accent?
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