American Crime 3.1-2: 21st-Century Dickensian Focus

American Crime, one of the best shows on television - and on ABC, not cable or streaming, no less - is back for its third season, and off to a powerful start.

The theme this year is, again, remarkably apt, with a focus on migrant farm workers in Carolina, and the attendant ills and crimes that best everyone in the vicinity.  So far, a young prostitute, a young drug addict, and a father from Mexico in search of his son who came to make it rich in the United States are the best stories - along with the attempt of decent people, in and out of government, to help them.

This puts the third season in marked contrast to the first season, in which there was a homicide and near-homicide at its core, and the second season, which delved into a high school party rape.  But the third season has its own quiet power, which even after just two episodes is special and remarkable.

The most interesting story is about the Mexican father, played by Benito Martinez.  For most of the first two episodes, we didn't know why he wanted to come and work in the U.S.   Tonight we discover that it's to find his son, who after communicating with his family back in Mexico, suddenly fell silent.

The story of the drug user is also unusual.   He's played by Connor Jessup, picked up off the street by one of the crew bosses, played by Richard Cabral.   But it turns out this boss has something of a heart, and may, against the advice of a more seasoned boss, actually try to help the newbie.

Regina King, outstanding in now her third season on American Crime, is a social worker who tries to help the prostitute, and (of course) has problems of her own.   But speaking of outstanding, the acting of everyone in American Crime, by mostly the same cast in different roles each season, is excellent and riveting.  This, combined with the unflinching topics and 21st-century Dickensian focus, makes American Crime a series you just can't afford to miss.

See also: American Crime 2.1-3: So Real, It Hurts ... American Crime through 2.6: Brilliant and Unflinching ... American Crime Season 2: Too Little Info

And see also: American Crime, American Fine ... American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love ... American Crime 1.10: The Exquisite Hazards of Timing ...American Crime Season 1 Finale: The Banality of So-Called Justice

a different kind of crime

American Crime Season 2: Too Little Info

American Crime, arguably one of the best and most important series ever on any kind of television - network, cable, streaming - which I would be happy to argue on behalf, ended last night on a less than stellar note, with too many unanswered questions.

First and foremost, we still can't be sure what happened to Taylor, on the night he presumably was raped, or had unconsensual sex with Eric.  The problem is that both Eric and Taylor seem sympathetic and convincing in their contradicting assertions.  I'm not sure I see the point in casting and leaving this situation in such ambiguous terms.   And just to add more insulting ambiguity to the injured storyline, we also aren't told if Eric is getting into that car at the end - a car which represents his coming out into a very new kind of life.

I also wasn't happy with the way the show morphed into a cautionary tale about hacking, again with no resolution.  The result not only diverted from the important sexual assault, gun violence, and racism stories, but with its hackers-being-hacked message pitched us into the paranoid world already and much more effectively explored in Mr. Robot.

Don't get me wrong - I love ambiguous endings, in some cases, as I made clear in my Sopranos End and the Closure Junkies little essay about the sudden cut to black at the end of The Sopranos.  But that was very different from what we saw last night in American Crime, which was more frustrating that suddenly, bi-explicably shocking.

Nonetheless, American Crime remains in a class of its own - a very good class, as I said above - and I'm therefore very much looking to a third season, which hasn't been announced at this moment.  I hope a third season brings back the repertoire company which played so well in the first two seasons, including Benito Martinez, who put in a brief, unexpected appearance last night.

See also: American Crime 2.1-3: So Real, It Hurts ... American Crime through 2.6: Brilliant and Unflinching

And see also: American Crime, American Fine ... American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love ... American Crime 1.10: The Exquisite Hazards of Timing ...American Crime Season 1 Finale: The Banality of So-Called Justice

a different kind of crime

#SFWApro

American Crime 2.7: Seeds of a School Shooting

One thing you can depend on in American Crime, one of the most powerful and important series ever on television: when things get really bad, they get even worse.  Until last night's episode 2.7, we had a rape and a searing portrayal of anti-gay bias and racial relations.   Last night we had a murder - in a school.

And in many ways the most horrifying thing about this shooting is that it was deeply motivated, to the point in which you can almost feel that the victim had it coming.   Taylor was not only raped a few weeks ago, but beaten a few days ago by the homo-phobic jocks in the school.  He shows up with a gun, but we don't know what he actually would have done it.
Possibly nothing.   But he uses it after one of his beaters threatens to kill him if he makes any more trouble.

This part of the story is also an indictment of how easy it is to get guns in this country.  Taylor gets it from a closet, where it shouldn't have been left.   The irresponsibility of gun owners results in a continuing stream of deaths in America.

Connor Jessup gives a tour-de-force performance as the kid with the tortured soul and the gun.  Even the people who have tried to help have been making his mental situation worse.  He told his mother what happened - that was he raped - in the first place, but pleaded with her not to go to the press, which she did.   His girlfriend tried to comfort him, but got furious when she found out he was gay.

And Taylor is still struggling with his sexual identity.  Drugs, of course, only make all of this worse.

And now the police, who have had not much of a role this season, in contrast to last, will be pulling Taylor into the criminal injustice system.  Look for things in American Crime to get even worse.

See also: American Crime 2.1-3: So Real, It Hurts ... American Crime through 2.6: Brilliant and Unflinching

And see also: American Crime, American Fine ... American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love ... American Crime 1.10: The Exquisite Hazards of Timing ...American Crime Season 1 Finale: The Banality of So-Called Justice

a different kind of crime

#SFWApro

American Crime through 2.6: Brilliant and Unflinching

American Crime in its second season continues to be what it was in its first season - a brilliant, unflinching examination of American life, with all its warts.  As of episode 2.6, it's easily still one of the best series ever on television.

It's ugly and uncompromising, but that's the way truth often is.   The revelation that Taylor is gay could have been the end of his rape story - it certainly was a stunner - but it actually is only the beginning of a much deeper, and more needed narrative.  Rape aka unconsensual sex is wrong - not only morally, it's a brutal crime - regardless of whether the victim is gay or heterosexual, and regardless of the sexual orientation of the perpetrator.

Of course, many of the characters in this story don't see it that way.   They assume, out of prejudice, that if a boy or man claims he was raped by a man, and the victim turns out to be gay, that this fact somehow negates the rape, or makes the act automatically consensual.   If that absurd argument were true, then that would negate the myriad of heterosexual women who have been raped by heterosexual men over the millennia.

The acting, as it was in the first season, is just exceptional.   Not only Connor Jessup as Taylor and Joey Pollari as his accused rapist Eric, but everyone around them and in this story gives edge-of-your-seat performances.

The default mode in American Crime is powder keg, either already lit or about to be.  There are no doubt some shockers and shake-ups ahead, and I'm both looking forward to and bracing for the ride.

See also: American Crime 2.1-3: So Real, It Hurts

And see also: American Crime, American Fine ... American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love ... American Crime 1.10: The Exquisite Hazards of Timing ... American Crime Season 1 Finale: The Banality of So-Called Justice

a different kind of crime

#SFWApro

American Crime 2.1-3: So Real It Hurts

Checking in with a review of American Crime, now three episodes in to its second season on ABC.   Like the first season, which drilled down on a brutal murder and its ugly repercussions not only in the criminal police system but on family relations, racial relations, and diverse elements of life in today's America, the second season holds back nothing as it delves into a rape in high school - the rape of a boy who wants to be on the basketball team by at least one of the guys on the team or who wants to be on the team, at a hazing party.

So in addition to the racial and family tensions which propelled the first season, we have the big business and sacrifice and sleaze of high school sports in this second season.  As in the first season, just about everyone is culpable of something, including the victim's mother, driven to get some sort of reckoning for her son, not just because she's seeking justice, but because she's driven by guilt over some earlier development in the family, as yet unknown.

Connor Jessup - last seen in Falling Skies - is doing a fine job as Taylor Blaine, the victim, who would just as soon forget what happened rather than see himself headlined in the social media, one of the biggest destructive forces in this story.  Taylor's mother is powerfully played by Lili Taylor, from the first season, but with a much bigger role.  Regina King, Timothy Hutton, Felicity Huffman, Elvis Nolasco, and Richard Cabral are also back from the first season, in completely different roles.

At this point, Regina King's Terri LaCroix has been the most stand-out, as the mother of one of team's co-captains - at the hazing party, but not necessarily part of the rape - at least, not as far as we know at this point. Terri and her husband and son are in the upper middle class - professional and executive - and her attempt to keep her son on the right path, her struggle as both the mother of a teenage boy and the mother of a teenage African-American boy with talent and intelligence and everything to lose, is a masterpiece of subtle, complex, heart-rending drama in itself.

As was the case in the first season, there's nothing else quite like American Crime on any kind of television.   As such it makes a much needed and unique contribution, and more than holds its own with anything on cable or even streaming TV.


See also: American Crime, American Fine ... American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love ... American Crime 1.10: The Exquisite Hazards of Timing ... American Crime Season 1 Finale: The Banality of So-Called Justice

a different kind of crime

#SFWApro

Breaking Bad: The Official Book: A Review

Breaking Bad is indisputably one of the titans of the second golden age of television - the first being Dragnet through The Twilight Zone in the 1950s-(early)1960s, the third being the masterpieces of streaming such as House of Cards on Netflix right now.  The second age, already fading just a bit, begins with The Sopranos and The Wire, and continues with American Crime (a brilliant exception to the fading).  It was born on cable, continues there to some degree, and inspired occasional greatness in network television.

Breaking Bad sits at the apex of this second golden age, not better per se than The Sopranos or The Wire, but even less connected to the crime stories of the past.   David Thomson, who edited this book, and wrote much of it, aptly says in the introductory chapter that "no American film of the twenty-first century has matched the achievement of Breaking Bad".  How could it - how could a narrative of let's say two-three hours possibly match a narrative of 52 hours, more or less, told over 5 seasons?

Breaking Bad: The Official Book presents every aspect of this tour-de-force you could possibly want, including in-depth interviews with creator Vince Gilligan and the people who called all the visual and acoustic shots.  There's a section on the show's predecessors and inspirations, ranging from The French Connection to Scarface.  The titles of each episode are compellingly deconstructed.  Each of the characters, major and minor, is analyzed to the max, all the way up and down, in life, and, usually, death. You'll find a whole section just on the chemistry of Breaking Bad - the literal science, ranging from ricin to lilies of the valley, which often literally ignited the narrative. This made me realize that another predecessor of Breaking Bad would be MacGiver - in addition to its other superlatives, Breaking Bad is also a masterpiece of science on television, educational against all odds, a Mr. Wizard set to riveting narrative.

The visual imagery is itself the story of Breaking Bad, and it's powerfully represented in this book with photography, including of the cars in Breaking Bad, that rivals what we or at least some people used to expect in Life Magazine.  Music was also an important part of the story, and my one regret about this book would be that I couldn't press an image on a page and get some music playing out it - but, hey, that's what the interactive Breaking Bad: Alchemy is for, and one of the joys of Breaking Bad: The Official Book is that this bad puppy doesn't need batteries to enjoy, and has more than a hundred new images to boot.

I have no doubt that the series will be watched and talked about for hundreds of years to come, and Breaking Bad: The Official Book will be a welcome and indispensable companion.



See also Breaking Bad Final Episodes #1: Walt vs. Hank ... Breaking Bad Final Episodes #2: Skylar and Jesse ... Breaking Bad Final Episodes #3: The Ultimate Lie ... Breaking Bad Final Episodes #4: Old Yeller ... Breaking Bad Final Episode #5: Coordinates ... Breaking Bad Final Episode #6: The Knife and the Phone ...  Breaking Bad Penultimate: $10,000 for 2 Hours ... Breaking Bad Finale: "I Did It for Me"

Talking about Walter White and Breaking Bad

And see also Breaking Bad Season 5 Premiere: Riveting Entropy ... Breaking Bad 5.3: Deal with the Devil ... Breaking Bad 5.7: Exit Mike ... Breaking Bad Final Half-Season Finale

And see also My Prediction about Breaking Bad ... Breaking Bad Season 4 Debuts ... Breaking Bad 4.2: Gun and Question ... Breaking Bad 4.11: Tightening Vice ... Breaking Bad 4.12: King vs. King ... Breaking Bad Season 4 Finale: Deceptive Flowers

American Crime Season 1 Finale: The Banality of So-Called Justice

American Crime ended is first season last night with its story of star-crossed lovers, Carter and Aubry, whose complicated love was too pure, too innocent, too compelling and beautiful to ever survive this gaggingly ugly and brutal world.   Carter dies from Russ's bullet  just as he's trying to call Aubry, no doubt to tell her he loves her, and Aubry's last thought before she dies of her own hand is maybe somehow Carter survived.

But we can the narrow indictment to something more specific than the world, and I don't mean just the hapless, tormented Russ, whom I'll get to in a minute.  It's the breathtaking cluelessness of the justice system - more destructive, in some ways, than mere corruption - which can't get anything right.  We've seen evil in police work on television before - The Shield would be an outstanding example - but never an exposition such as in American Crime of a system so rotten at every level.   The season ends without our knowing who did the initial killing, and certainly the authorities don't know.  They're good at nothing - not catching the criminals in the first place, not protecting the souls who come into their custody - except providing an effective training camp for further criminal acts.   I suppose this banal ineptitude afflicts most parts of our society, but it's especially grievous when it inhabits a system in which life and death is literally at stake.

Certainly the inanity prevails in the ease with which people can get guns in this country.  I knew the moment Barb bought the gun that its bullets would be used to kill Carter, though I thought she not Russ would pull the trigger.   But, in retrospect, Russ was always more broken than Barb, and it figures that his naive belief in the justice system (taking its word for it, to the end, that Carter killed his son) - unlike Barb, who was finally maybe glimpsing a deeper truth, and was pulling away from the system - would propel Russ to his act, pathetic for him, the ultimate voice of the deadly ignorant injustice for Carter and Aubry.

There are slender threads of hope, maybe Carter's sister and Aubry's mother hugging, now that Carter and Aubry can't, and perhaps realizing that they contributed to the deaths of Carter and Aubry, too. Maybe Hector, maybe Tony, but the odds are against them, as long as this sick system of justice continues.

America needs more shows like John Ridley's American Crime and its splendid acting (special kudos to Caitlin Gerard, Elvis Nolasco, Richard Cabral, Benito Martinez, Regina King, Timothy Hutton, and Felicity Huffman, but everyone was just brilliant) to strip the system bare, so we can see it for what it is.  The more I think about it,  American Crime is the best series on television in many a year. I'm glad there'll be more of it next season.

See also: American Crime, American Fine ... American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love ... American Crime 1.10: The Exquisite Hazards of Timing

a different kind of crime

#SFWApro

American Crime 1.10: The Exquisite Hazards of Timing

American Crime - which aired its next-to-last episode, 1.10, of this season last night, after the welcome news that the series will be back for at least a second season next year - continues to weave a mosaic unparalleled in television with its many pieces and exquisitely interconnected complexity.

So, right before our very eyes last night, Carter is released from prison, Abrey takes his place for the murder, and Hector is back in Mexican custody, having been outed as a total liar about what he says he witnessed on the night of the crime.   Timing is everything is this ticking clockwork time bomb of a narrative, as it is in real life, if you think about it.  Had Aubry not confessed last week - a logical step for her, after she saw what her mother had been doing to keep Aubry and Carter apart, which meant Carter likely headed to death row (for conviction on a Federal hate crime charge) or life imprisonment - Carter might well have been released from prison anyway, with the truth coming out about Hector, though likely not as quickly.   But one of the telling keynotes of this story is that almost no one knows what anyone else is really up to or even doing - another characteristic of life in general.

There was some good news at last though in these mercilessly spinning wheels.  Tony's released after the fabulously heart-felt testimony of his sister, which confounds the evil Fates who would have delighted in Tony's being denied release, because his father was forced to sell his store to hire a decent attorney, and the judges or whoever they are wanted to know that Tony's family had a sound business to support him.   In one of the best scenes, Alonzo the father - perfectly played by veteran Benito Martinez (of The Shield) - gives voices to this insane, self-defeating system for the defense.

The acting, as I indicated in my last review, continues to be in a class of its own .  Caitlin Gerard with her performance as Aubry was clearly in tour-de-force territory last night, as was Richard Cabral as he always is with Hector.   I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a network television show so much, and have learned as much as I have from American Crime.

See also: American Crime, American Fine ... American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love

a different kind of crime

#SFWApro

American Crime 1.7: The Truest Love

Amidst all the lies, half-truths, betrayals, incompetence, and just plain evil that populates so much of American Crime - and in the case of the evil, especially some of the authorities - the one relationship that increasingly rings true and reliable is Aubry and Carter.

And never more true than in episode 1.7.   Carter is increasingly pressured by his sister to quit Aubry. But he just can't seem to do it, even though, as we've just seen, her instincts aren't the best, to say the least, for keeping the two of them out of trouble.   But Carter tells his sister that Aubry saved him. And, in his recollection, we see that was literally the case.

Meanwhile, Aubry is getting similar pressure to leave Carter from everyone around her.   In her case, there's a motive that the police are dangling in front of her: if she testifies against Carter, that would be her ticket to freedom.   For a moment, in the hospital, it seemed that she might be turning against Carter, though I couldn't believe it.   And I was gratified with that last scene, in which her horror story of what was done to her turns out to have her brother as the perpetrator.

So Aubry and Carter are the improbable rock of Gibraltar in this story, holding firm, for now, against the cesspool tempest of deceit that is daily hurled against them.  The question is how long can they endure it.   Optimist that I always am, I'm hoping they can, to the end - but the forces arrayed against them are powerful, indeed.

Although it's still not clear who committed this American crime, it's very clear that the police don't have a creditable witness against Carter.   Hector's obviously a complete liar, and the detectives know it.   The question is whether they'll allow the prosecutors to go ahead and use it.   Chances are they will - which is part of what I meant earlier about the authorities being reprehensible.

Not reprehensible, and indeed superb, to switch gears here, is the acting in this series.  Caitlin Gerard as Aubry and Elvis Nolasco as Carter are just outstanding - and, in episode 1.7 especially, delivered Emmy-worthy performances.   Richard Cabral as Hector is excellent, as is Regina King as Aliyah Shadeed (born Doreen Nix, Carter's sister), and I haven't even mentioned the big names such as Timothy Hutton and Felicity Huffman, who are putting in what will counted as among the best performances of their careers.   The other related stories, such as Alonzo and his family, are also searing and well acted.

John Ridley's American Crime is television at its hard-hitting, truth-searching, very best.

See also: American Crime, American Fine

a different kind of crime

#SFWApro

American Crime: American Fine

I thought it high time I checked in with a review of American Crime, the new ABC-TV series directed by John Ridley, who produced 12 Years a Slave.   In a word, the series is excellent - original, deep, superbly acted and plotted.  Well, that's more than one word, but they're all deserved.

In a very general way, American Crime is much like True Detective, the investigation of brutal murder(s) taking up an entire season.   In the case of American Crime, we have a married couple, the husband found murdered and the wife badly beaten and apparently sexually attacked.   They're white, and the suspects, quickly identified and rounded up by police in the first episode, are African-American and Hispanic.  The unfolding story reveals schism in the relationships of both sets of parents of the victims - as well as each set of parents to the other - as well profound differences in the suspects and their lives.   By the end of the third episode, we're giving some suspicions that the suspects may not be the perpetrators of the crimes.

Timothy Hutton and Felicity Huffman as parents of the slain Matt are outstanding, and put in what will be counted as among the best performances of their careers.   Hutton always had a large range, ranging from the comical to the cool, but his behind-the-eight-ball father in American Crime, struggling to the do the right thing in the face of a caustic wife and pressures from the parents of his son's wife Gwen, is  especially noteworthy and just masterful.

On the other side of this narrative,  Benito Martinez - whom I first got to know on The Shield - puts in a great performance as Alonzo Gutierrez, the father of one of the people arrested, a boy whose only crime seems to have been giving a car to known gang members.   Seeing Alonzo get chewed up by the legal system,  striving to keep his son out its legal claws but mostly failing because he doesn't fully understand what's going on, is a sight to behold as well as instructive about how minorities are treated when they get pulled in the criminal system in this country, whether or not through any fault of their own.   Just to underscore this point, we get a searingly memorable scene in the third episode in which his daughter Jenny, totally innocent, is almost drawn into this sick system herself - that is, she's almost arrested, when she has been doing nothing wrong.

Also memorable is Caitlin Gerard as Aubrey, drug addict and girlfriend of one of the incarcerated suspects, not dumb, but abused by life, literally thrown in a scrapheap after passing out and being sexually abused, and doing whatever she can to hold on.   We've seen characters like this on many a police drama over the years, but none quite as effective in this role.

If the first three episodes are any indication, we can expect all kinds of twists and turns and heartbreaks and maybe a sigh or two of relief in the episodes ahead, and I'm looking forward them all.

a different kind of crime