K-Ville: Taking the (Big) Easy Way Out
Robert Sebree/FOX
There are things you want to do and things you have to do. I want to review K-Ville for the show it could have been--a cop drama that portrays post-Katrina New Orleans by showing the struggle to maintain order. I have to review it for what it actually is: an unimpressive police procedural with a few social and character elements shoehorned in. I want to praise it for giving a lead role to Anthony Anderson, who was so good in The Shield. I have to pan it for wasting him in a show that just reminds you how good The Shield is by comparison.
K-Ville, for its part, wants to be a different, timely and relevant show about a part of the country that TV drama has still mostly ignores after two years. But what it has to be--I suspect under network pressure, after so many ambitious serial dramas failed last season--is a mostly dumbed-down crime-of-the-week show, in which the crimes and their resolutions are not interesting enough to justify the compromise.
The premise behind K-Ville is strong enough: Martin Boulet (Anderson) is an NOPD cop who's stuck it out in his city--and his neighborhood, the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward--even as his fellow cops have split and his wife has left for Atlanta with their flood-traumatized daughter. He's paired with Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser), a cop with a suspect past who's appeared out of nowhere. Boulet doesn't trust Cobb, but the department is too strapped to turn down a warm body willing to work.
If the idea had been sold to FX, or another cable network freer to go all in with the concept, this could have been a show worth talking about. As it is, the first two episodes are by-rote whodunits with a little local color and glimpses of New Orleans' desperate straits thrown in. (Some post-flood graffiti reads, "FEMA: Fix Everything My Ass.") This compromise might have worked if the two halves of the show--the want to and have to halves--had been better integrated. But the procedural elements are so ordinary, it's jarring when K-Ville suddenly shows signs of broader purpose, with stories of prison labor used to rebuild New Orleans and police precinct houses where the copy machines don't work.
The problem with this kind of mash-up is that raw realism is incompatible with the police procedural fantasy world, where cases get solved in an hour. The Shield handles this by having some stories stretch out for seasons, others for several episodes. Vic Mackey and the Strike Team knock out some cases in an episode, but usually by extra-legal means--which both underscores the themes of the show and makes the point that no real cop could get results so often so quickly without busting heads.
In K-Ville, on the other hand, Boulet and Cobb are just police who live in a real city, but work in TV Cop Land. It could have turned out better, but what we ended up with is a crime.
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This is a disturbing trend, making procedurals out of shows that would clearly be better as serials. This is what I hate about The Closer -- why take a great actress and a great character and use her to solve a different crime in 40 minutes every week?
Worse, this isn't even limited to crime shows. At some point an ABC exec watched Pushing Daisies and said, "This is great…but couldn't he also catch a murderer every week?" I know there's a lot of backlash against last fall's glut of serials, but it's not like the genre is dead. Hill Street Blues was a hit 25 years ago, Heroes was a hit last year, and even the popular reality shows play out over several months. Last year's Veronica Mars re-tooling proved that if people didn't watch a show as a serial, they won't watch it as a procedural.
Sorry for ranting, it just bothers me that networks ignore the storytelling possibilities of television as a serial medium and decide to make 22 crappy hour-long movies instead. And people wonder why the best dramas are all on cable.
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@BB: Oh, yes, you'll be hearing more about that whole trend in this space in the coming weeks. You're preaching to the choir on this one.
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When does the Wire come back on?
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Amen beerbaron (even if you hated on the Midwest last week). TV viewers don't get about whether a show is procedural or serial - they care about good television (or, at least, entertaining TV). With TiVos, iTunes, and internet streaming video, no network should compromise the artistic bounds of a show just to make it more procedural (or, vice versa, for that matter...some shows work better straight up as procedurals).
Too bad K-ville took the wrong route - an engaging police drama set against the backdrop of post-Katrina New Orleans chaos? Great idea. The show you seem to describe? Okay, but nowhere near as promising...
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HBO has not announced Wire dates yet, but unofficially, early next year (I would guess January).
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I think maybe the audience FOX is aiming for with this show doesn't really have TiVos, cable, or computers nice enough to use internet streaming video. So we can't really blame them for the choices they made.
But I am so glad you reviewed this, James, because now I can not watch it and remember Anthony Anderson in all his Shield glory.
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I thought it was garbage.
There's a chance that the show could develop and grow so maybe it won't just be canceled right away. But in my fantasies, this show was an A+ window into the city that care forgot, a show that had every American in front of their television sets every week, engaging them in a broad look at the problems we face in reality, winning Emmy Awards and challenging national politicians to find solutions all along the way. Fox would lead into the season finale by playing Spike Lee's documentary unedited and without commercials.
What this city needs and deserves is a weekly documentary. We don't need fictional glorification of our broken police department, cartoon portrayal of neighborhood violence, or an overall exoneration of the government's culpability in our daily disaster.
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- poniewozik Loved the season. Mrs Tuned In wd have put u on the main list RT @boredtodeath Thank u for incl us in Time's Top 10. We'll take hon mention. - 7 hours ago
- poniewozik @carr2n Virgin is the best, LAX-JFK - 8 hours ago
- poniewozik Did NPR interview abt multiscreen multitasking. After, automatically reached for iPhone in pocket. Like don draper wd have for cigarettes. - 9 hours ago
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