Let’s Talk Television: Crime All the Way Down

I watch a lot of television. Not necessarily the most prestigious or popular or, um, good television. My favorite shows are messy. Shows that get more points for trying than succeeding. Shows that require me to do mental gymnastics in order to make them make sense. I like to say I watch terrible television so you don’t have to. Because I also love to talk about it.

I do these posts periodically, usually starting up around Fall premieres, and then they peter out because I am at all times busy with at least six projects and also normal life and I am that very special and specific brand of indecisive and easily distracted. This year Spring is the new Fall (or Winter is the new Fall, I guess, but I work in academia so I think in terms of semesters and from what I can see, so does Hollywood) thanks to the strikes (for the record I am very pro-union, pro-WGA, and pro-SAG-AFTRA, and pro-strike). Point being, I’m starting now because my current shows are starting up.

New This Week

NCIS: Sydney (Tuesday, Paramount+)

This is the only series on the list that is not produced by Wolf Entertainment. And I’m not a devotee of the NCIS franchise the way I am of the Law and Order franchise (I’m in the official Dedicated Detectives chat on Instagram, it’s truly embarrassing). I haven’t seen more than 20something episodes of any other NCIS, and mostly New Orleans because it starred Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula). But Sydney is an Australian series so it arrived in the Fall, when next to nothing else was new, and P+ dropped it onto my “For You” list. I decided to give it a shot. And it is an entirely formulaic crime procedural full of pretty people with quirky personalities and relationship baggage and a job that requires them to be traumatized on the reg. And I feel confident that this show gets the military, forensics, and Australian culture more wrong than right. Thus it is exactly like every other terrible show on this post and I love it.

This week featured fancy dress, an escape room, an AI tech bro lady trying to get the military on her side and failing spectacularly, “my water just broke”, a game of Screw/Marry/Kill your coworkers brought on by hypoxia, fighting over leftovers, tattoo reveals, and my fave Georgina Haig in a recurring role. It was utterly ridiculous and it was delightful.

Chicago Med (Thursday, Peacock)

This is the only series on the list that is not a crime procedural. But it’s a spin-off of a crime procedural and part of the larger “One Chicago” universe that also shares a reality with the other Wolf series, even the ones on a whole other network (the FBIs of CBS). So the line is blurry.

Season nine premiered with a multi-car crash that flooded the ER. Crockett (Dominick Rains) ventured back into OR 2.0, the AI assisted operating room that went rogue last year. Hot new doctor Ripley (Luke Mitchell) was a patient of psych head Dr. Charles (Oliver Platt) when he was a troubled teen locked in a ward— and he is still angry about it. But what really matters is my girl Hannah (Jessy Schram, the actress I’d pick to play me in a movie) and I can’t believe how much I care about this asshole Dean (Steven Weber) continue to have 🔥 chemistry and however they decide to move forward with that relationship I’m here for it. To catch up the normal people who only watch these shows through me: at the end of last season Dean’s son Sean (Luigi Sottile) wanted to ask Hannah out but then saw them together and realized he was in a love triangle with his dad and fell off the wagon so he could no longer donate his kidney to his dying father BUT now six months have gone by, Sean is sober, and the kidney transplant is going forward. Hilariously this is not the first parent-child-other love triangle on the show, Crockett dated his superior and her daughter a few seasons ago. I half think it all means Hannah and Crockett are destined to get together eventually.

Chicago PD (Thursday, Peacock)

I gave up on Chicago PD a few years ago but I got dragged back in over the hiatus thanks to some tumblr posts that ended up on my dash (it is honestly a little concerning how much the algorithms want me to watch copaganda).

Hailey (Tracy Spiradakos) is leaving after this season and I’d love the show to reckon with how Voight (Jason Beghe) runs off all the people he takes under his wing (Lindsay, Jay, now Hailey) but I have no expectations for anything like that. And given Adam (Patrick Flueger) is already training to be back to work and Voight is refusing to accept any replacement, I also have low expectations for his near fatal injury to be a big deal. On one hand, I came back to this show for Adam and Kim (Marina Squerciati), on the other hand I would like one (1) of the life altering injuries sustained on these series to actually alter someone’s life.

Law & Order (Friday, Peacock)

The OG Law & Order is my OG crime procedural but these days it’s the one I am least invested in. For the twelve years it was off the air in between season 20 and season 21 (now we’re on season 23) it was my go-to answer for “what show do you wish had more seasons” — now I wonder if it’s a case of “be careful what you wish for”. The issue is TV moved on in those twelve years but Law & Order chooses to stick with the formula in perfected in 1990.

The premiere hit the ground running with a story ripped from headlines that are literally still headlines: a fight over freedom of expression, wrt the Israel-Palestine war and on a college campus, that results in the murder of Hudson University’s president. These are headlines that affect me personally because I work at a university. So I am biased, but from my biased perspective the show added absolutely nothing to the conversation and it left a bad taste in my mouth. It was every left, right, and center argument I’ve read in the past three months tied together in a ugly morass that killed three people and ruined three other people’s lives. I’m not mad they didn’t provide any answers — there are no answers to this conflict that can be provided in a tight 47 minutes — I’m mad they didn’t engage with the questions at all. And that’s my complaint about the revived series in a nutshell.

In other news, Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) is out and Riley (Reid Scott) is in. The transition was clunky, with half the scenes forced to explain who Riley is and where Cosgrove went and the other half seemingly written for Cosgrove. Or both, as when Riley hears that Cosgrove is gone for “being too honest about things people aren’t too honest about these days” and responds “it is not a great time to have an opinion”.

Do better, OG.

Law & Order: SVU (Friday, Peacock)

SVU turns 25 this season, outpacing the original despite premiering nine years later (ngl I love that it feels like time travel shenanigans). The extra almost a decade in development served it well. SVU premiered on the cusp of the switch from episodic to serialized television and SVU realized that including the personal lives of its protagonists was important. So it was better equipped to bridge the transition by sticking with the one case per episode formula but having ongoing storylines as a frame.

SVU’s silver jubilee begins with a clip show of Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) over the years, narrated by Benson’s musings about her lifelong commitment to protect the innocent. We’ve been told SVU25 will highlight past cases and make Olivia think about her life and I guess we’re jumping right in. Liv spends the episode beating herself up about not saving a kidnapped girl before she knew the girl was kidnapped— and I do think it’s important that the moment when the girl crossed her line of vision takes place in the middle of a conversation with her kid and right after a conversation about her love life. Olivia prioritized the job over her personal life for all the years of SVU 1.0 (the Benson-Stabler years of seasons 1 to 12) and SVUs 2.0 (post-Stabler leaving seasons 13-22.1) and 3.0 (post-Stabler’s back seasons 22.2-present) have been a long slow march to figuring out a balance between them.

My favorite part of the episode by far was when Olivia shows up to Professor Rollins’ (Kelli Giddish) class and Amanda helps her work through the case. I hate that Amanda (Kelli) was run off the squad (series) last season but I love, love, love that she’s since been portrayed as Smart AF and the go-to crime consultant. Amanda is perfect, Rolivia is perfect, Rollisi is perfect, baby Nicky is perfect.

I’m also excited that the Maddie case appears to be ongoing. SVU 3.0 is a nice hybrid between OG’s episodic stubbornness and OC’s fully serialized arcs.

Law & Order: Organized Crime (Friday, Peacock)

I watch the Laws & Orders in broadcast order (OG->SVU->OC) and it ends up a nice progression from the (THE) standard crime procedural to the hot mess melodrama of my heart. OC is full on sensationalized ridiculousness anchored by emote king Elliot Stabler (Chris Meloni) and I love every overwrought minute.

Elliot’s current case and focus is finding and destroying Los Santos, the main purveyors of fentanyl in New York, and the OCCB is also piloting a new AI smartware but all of that is just background for our four leads emotional entanglements. They are all mourning Jamie (Brent Antonello), killed off in last season’s finale, and the result is Elliot being reckless in the field (tbf that’s nothing new), Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt) agreeing to the AI test run (unknown as yet if that’s a good or bad decision), and Jet (Ainsley Siegler) and Reyes (Rick Gonzalez) having an illicit affair (almost certainly a bad decision but I’m into it).

Meanwhile Elliot’s mama Bernie (Ellen Burstyn) continues to struggle with dementia and it’s all very heartbreaking, especially when she tells Elliot she wants his big brother Randall instead. I am very excited to meet even more of Elliot’s super messy family.

Also Watching

I am always in the middle of binge rewatching something or other. This past week I finished the back half of season three in my third watch of Hart of Dixie. My understanding is most fans don’t like this era, when the romantic shenanigans include none of the “endgame” couples. But I am a big supporter of “endgame” couples dating other people, even random other people, if and when they’re not allowed to be “endgame” until the “end” which is the near universal assumption in writers rooms. It’s called character growth outside of specific relationships, which is healthy, and also people are allowed to date and even love more than one person in their life, that’s also healthy!

Anyway, Hart of Dixie remains great.

Mental Illness Sidebar

Chicago Med tackled addiction and overmedication. The first was good. Hannah was introduced as an addict and the show has been pretty good at making it important to her character while not defining her character, and in this case the message of the plotline was ‘recovery is hard and requires an ongoing commitment from everyone involved’ which is true and thus an important message to put out there.

The second is TBD. Dr. Riley was in an institution as a teen and routinely medicated to protect himself and others. Dr. Charles, who treated him at the time, acknowledges that he was probably overmedicated. Flashforward to the present and Riley takes a bipolar patient off one of his mood stabilizing meds because it’s having an adverse reaction on his physical health— but that has an adverse reaction on his mental health. Riley overcoming his past and how it relates to Charles and to his present convictions about mental health is clearly going to be an ongoing storyline. And it’s an interesting one! But I’m worried that it will lack nuance because Chicago Med doesn’t know what that word means.

Chicago PD introduced a new Crime Prevention Unit based around deescalation that’s headed by a mental health professional. Hailey rides along and completely fails the program’s ideals, which sends her into a spiral and ultimately results in a suicide though she’s able to save the victim she mistook for a perpetrator. This is another plotline whose worth is TBD. I’d love to see a crime procedural portray the potential of trauma informed care and mental health professionals in the PD field but given this series is basically “questionably moral policing is necessary and therefore good” the show I am super scared.

Organized Crime is tackling drugs and already three (3!) of their detectives had to seek medical help after exposure to fentanyl. Jet absorbed some through her skin, it got into Elliot’s blood stream, and Reyes inhaled. In fairness, Reyes and Elliot’s exposure was extreme and Jet was least affected but it’s walking a fine line between responsible storytelling (lol) and playing up the myth of fentanyl taking out cops.

Every one of the Wolf series touched on trauma and trauma responses and how well they did is directly correlated to how much I enjoyed them. The traumarama is why I watch/love these shows.

Ship of the Week

Look, I’m easy. The SVU premiere did not give us an overt mention of Elliot Stabler or their long running slow burn romance, but Olivia did fiddle with the necklace her gave her at the end of last season more than once — and specifically while thinking about love. And OC, which really only exists because we all care about EO so much, had Elliot calling Liv, admitting he did it because he missed her, and gazing at a news report about her being the best at her job with so much pride and joy that I had the same goofy grin on my face watching him watching her. Plus Elliot clocked the Reyes and Jet relationship right away because of its parallels to his and Olivia’s back in the day. It’s pretty clear the shows are giving us happy moments with Rollins and Carisi and angsty moments with Jet and Reyes in place of happy and/or angsty moments with Olivia and Elliot. But it is equally clear EO is endgame and I’m easy.

Show of the Week

Toss up between SVU and OC and honestly they are basically two parts of the same dysfunctional show.

What are YOU watching and what are your thoughts?