The Chi Review

For all the progress that Showtime has made over the last decade when it comes to its original programming, it hasn't exactly made leaps and bounds when it comes to doing series with predominantly African-American casts. So one wants to give credit to Showtime for trying to develop a series like The Chi (even though that's a terrible title) a series developed by such assured talent as Lena Waithe, an African-American woman who in 2017 became the first black woman to win an Emmy for writing, and Common, who managed to build some impressive work in WGN's cancelled to soon Underground. And admittedly, the series has aspirations that I admire - trying to see how a single murder in a playground has ripple effects around an entire neighborhood.

But The Chi is not The Wire or American Crime. It isn't even Treme.  And a huge part of the problem is that I'm three episodes into the series, and I still can't identify any distinctive characters. The Wire had a spider's web of a story, but it managed to identify rather strongly at least eight or nine real characters by this point in its run. In this series, Waithe, who so far, has introduced some interest characters but hasn't bothered to make connection between them all. A young man who played basketball was shot in the premiere. His body was identified by his mother, and the man who raised him Greavy, who was a CI to the detective investigating the murder, Cruz. Cruz makes a mistake, and tells him about a boy who was seen standing over the body. Greavy looks into to this boy, after the police end up releasing him, and he accidentally gets shot.  The boy's older brother, Brandon (Jason Mitchell) takes his death extremely hard, and clearly wants some kind of vengeance. But he's also trying to deal with problems with his mother, Laverne (Sonja Sohn, the only direct link to The Wire) , who is clearly some kind of addict, and who seems determined to ruin his life.

All of this is logical enough. But there are so many excess characters that so far haven't yet formed a link to the main plot. There's a twenty-ish man named Eugene, who's still living with his mother, Jada (Yolanda Ross) and who hasn't much evolved in his life beyond bringing multiple women home to his apartment to have sex. The fact that one of his girlfriends presented him with his son, and that his mother refuses to take care of him because 'her babysitting days are over' is funny, and there's a certain general pain in the fact that he's another black man raising a child without a father, but there's still no connection between this and the overarching plot. There's also an intriguing story about a ten-year old who works as a lookout on a corner, being roped in by a bigger girl to star in his grade school's production of The Wiz, but it seems even more scattershot, and one wishes they would stick to the drug story, because that at least has a point. And there's this older man named Q (Steven Williams) who seems to have some pull in this community, but one can't tell yet if he's this show's Stringer Bell or Avon Barksdale.

Arguably, the best parts of The Chi are when it tries to follow the investigation. There's a rivalry between Detective Cruz and another detective named Wallace in narcotics, who clearly doesn't like Cruz, and is far more cynical about the job that they do, When he pulls Cruz away from the stash house, and Cruz says one of the kids isn't involved, Wallace says: "Doesn't matter. Eventually he will be, and then all we have to do is file the paperwork. But part of the reason this works is because we know who they are - a lot of the time Waithe does a poor job of identifying her characters.

I admire this show for what it's trying to do, but compared to the recent spate of far better series on Showtime and some other network work on the urban scene, The Chi is a pale imitation. It may get better, and maybe at the end of the season, all the pieces will matter, but I'm not sure the audience will be around for the whole thing.

My score:2.75 stars.