Homicide Episode Guide: All Is Bright

Written by Rafael Alvarez; story by James Yoshimura and Julie Martin

Directed by Matt Reeves

Well, for the first time in three years, its Christmas for the Homicide  squad. And while there may be putting up a tree in the Waterfront, and hanging tinsel on the board, neither murder nor morality take a holiday. The detectives learn this in spades in ‘All is Bright’.

For the first time Ballard and Gharty get handed a murder of their own to investigate. The deceased is Philip Longley, who gets assaulted with a bottle of detergent at his local Laundromat and has bleach poured down his throat in the bargain. We don’t get the motive, however, until the autopsy is finished and it is revealed that Longley was HIV positive--- a big deal, when you are as sexually active as Longley was.  What strikes us as galling is that Longley (who showed no outward sign of his illness) had the disease for six years and told no one about it, save his mother--- and he had no problem spreading his love all over Baltimore.  The ironic twist is that got him killed by a woman he had already done the same to--- the woman who killed him was infected.

Continuing in the tradition of the ‘walking dead’ that perforate this season is Rita Hale, a woman in the final stages of AIDS. Openly covered with sores, Hale has less than five months to live. It’s obvious she had motive and she makes it pretty clear she would have done it. The detectives, however, are split on how to handle it. Ballard (perhaps not surprisingly) is prepared to overlook Hale’s crime as she has been the victim of a greater evil. Gharty remains cool and detached but you can’t escape the feeling that he is prejudiced against her because of her disease. The episode comes down to an extended sequence in the box between the two detectives and Hale.  Hale is openly scornful, sarcastic, and eventually sorrowful and you get the feeling that neither Ballard or Gharty is wild about what they’re doing. Ballard is so upset by it that she butts head with Gee over charging her. While the lieutenant isn’t unsympathetic, he  is blunt--- Hale is a killer first and a person afterwards.

Callie Thorne gives her first solid performance as Ballard. We learn a bit about her in the interrogation--- she had a fiancé in Seattle, and is currently dating someone in Baltimore--- but her attitude towards Hale, and the other women Longley slept with indicates her real opinion about the deceased. It is also clear that she has her own worries (she gets tested for HIV at the end of the episode) Equally memorable is Kathyrn Erbe as Rita.  Erbe is a fine actress (after this episode, Fontana would cast her in Oz as another doomed woman, murderer Shirley Bellinger) and in her few scenes she creates a memorable woman, bitter, sad and ultimately haunting.

Ballard and Gharty aren’t the only detectives faced with hard choices.  Falsone continues to dog Kellerman over the Luther Mahoney shooting and Kellerman reluctantly tells Lewis that Georgia Rae might have a tape of the murder. Meldrick is understandably pissed by this and this will cause the estrangement between the two partners to get even worse. Kellerman is rapidly becoming isolated from the unit.

Even the comic subplot is pretty grim. We meet Munch’s  first ex-wife Gwen as she calls on him to help her plan his former mother-in-law’s funeral. Gwen’s mother was a major literary critic, and had a huge number of colleagues in the literary world. With the help of Munch’s brother Bernard, they plan for large reception--- only to have no one there, save for true-crime novelist Peter Maas (playing himself). As Maas says, Munch’s mother-in-law was a bitter, hackneyed, unpleasant woman and he came just to make sure she was dead. Its pretty clear that this woman despised Munch and did everything in her power to break the two of them up.  Yet despite all this, after seeing his wife’s downfall, he delivers a rather nice eulogy for the woman at the Waterfront Christmas party.  For all his cynicism John can be really sweet sometimes.

Almost in passing, we see Bayliss, who has had a crush on Dr. Cox since he first met her, finally reveals his feelings for her by kissing her. The two of them will hook up for a while, but this relationship doesn’t last either. For Bayliss, however, it’s the start of a lot of action for him.

Not exactly a warm and fuzzy show, is it? Topping it off, we have one of the best music montages in a long time, as Suzanne Vega’s angry, metallic song ‘Blood Makes Noise’ plays as Rita gets booked. That image and sound will remain in your head long after the credits have rolled.

‘All is Bright’ is anything but. It is dark with difficult issues, deals with old wounds that don’t scab over and very problematic relationships—in short, its everything that we’ve come to expect from Homicide. This is great television

My score: 4.5 stars.

A Show That Lives Up To Its Name: For the People Review

By now anyone who has been following this column for a sustained length of time knows how much I loathe Shonda Rhimes. I even wrote up a column just two weeks where I cursed How To Get Away With Murder for the 4000th time. So I expect everyone who reads the following review to judge this carefully, maybe give it more consideration.

By now, everyone knows the Shondaland formula. It follows a group of attractive people, usually very long, who are interested in three things: sex, advancement of their careers, and then maybe their profession, whether it be medicine, law or politics. The majority of the leads are females and/or minorities, and if they have any character at all, it shoved aside for the sake of their careers.

That's why For the People comes like a bucket of ice water to the system of someone used to this same formula. In the first three episodes, I've seen two sex scenes - which for Rhimes' world is almost virginal. The majority of the characters are in law, (yes, like in Murder) , but they still seem to be young enough not to have the idealism stomped out of them, and actually seem to believe in justice for their clients. And god help us, there's actually been character development in the episodes I've seen that doesn't pertain to sex. (Well, there is a character who seems bent solely on advancement and sex, but oddly enough, he's also the most loathed. Which is rare.)

For The People looks at a group of attorney's for 'The Mother Court', a district court in New York.  Three of the major attorneys have just been sworn in for the prosecutors, led primarily by Roger Gunn (Ben Shenkman). Three others work in the public defender's office, led by Jill Carlan (Hope Davis, finally getting work on television worthy of her.) There are also some fairly strong authority figures around the courtroom -the main bailiff, Tina Krissman (Anna Deaveare Smith is in the house!) and Judge Byrne, who oversees many of the courts and acts as referee (Vondie Curtis-Hall, where have you been the last ten years). Strangely enough, these authority figures are fully dimensional, and actually seem to try and give as much of a damn, while still trying to work within the system. It comes as little surprise that Smith's character is the most intriguing, as someone who tries to guide the PD's in the direction of people who need help, while trying to remain working within the system.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the attorney who play the PD's get some of the juicier storylines. There's a Jewish attorney who basically worked at his parent's dry cleaner to get through law school, who finds himself defending a neo-Nazi accused of trying to assassinate a state politician. He goes through all kinds of emotional  tug-of-war just trying to release him, and doesn't feel any better about what he's done when he's finished. There's Allison Adams, a PD, who is willing to break the rules with her boyfriend to get a client off, but still feels pain when it comes time to dealing with software that might end up sending a child not unlike her to a higher sentence. And in the lead role is Britt Robertson as Sandra Bell, a foster child who still burns at the injustices of the system, and who has too much empathy with her clients.

But by far the breakout character in this series is Susannah Flood portrayal of prosecutor Kate Littlejohn. A humorless, fast-talking, rules-following attorney, she seems what Paris Gellar might have become after Gilmore Girls. (And frankly, I'd rather have seen Liza Weill playing her than stuck as Bonnie in Murder.) She deliberately makes herself hard to like, lie so many Shondaland characters. But unlike those characters, people respect her, and there happens to be a soul in that characters. In last night's episode, she delivered a heartfelt monologue about her childhood desire for a trip to the Capitol and what thwarted it that was far more impassioned than I've heard in any series in awhile. And the way she worked on a project with Legos, and its final revelation actually revealed a depth that a lot of network characters don't have.

For the People, perhaps not that surprisingly, is more of a Shondaland series in all but name. It bears the producers production sign, but there's little else. It's extremely well written and acted, and genuinely seems to give a damn about its characters. Perhaps that's the main reason, it's running a poor third Tuesdays at 10pm. I have a request. For the People's ratings are about the same as How to Get Away With Murder, a Shondaland legal drama, which is anything but. ABC is going to have to make some tough choices about which series to kill. They'll probably end up saving both, but if I get a vote, it's for, well, you know.

My score: 4 stars.

Homicide Episode Guide: Saigon Rose

Written by Eric Overmeyer; story by Tom Fontana and James Yoshimura

Directed by Nick Gomez

It is rare for Homicide to draw its news from the real world, a la Law & Order.  Indeed, two of the times they did do something like this were in the crossovers they had done with Law & Order As for real cases I know of only  two regular Homicides that are based on real news stories not in Simon’s book are season 3 ‘Colors’ (which was based on the 1992 murder of a Japanese exchange students) and ‘Saigon Rose’ which is based on an incident in New Orleans a few months earlier.  Rather than deal with racism, as ‘Colors’ did, this one deals with  dark look inside the ugliness of a very  disturbed soul.

The episode deal with a multiple homicide at a Vietnamese restaurant. Four members of the Nguyen family are killed while sitting down to dinner at the family restaurant. Also killed is Officer Larry Jones, a policeman who moonlighted as a security guard for the family to earn some extra cash.  The motive is fairly obvious--- it was a very well-planned robbery. The reason that it breaks is because there are two surviving witnesses, two surviving children—they are  spared only because they are in the kitchen when the bullets start flying.  They can identify the voice of the killer--- a beat cop from the neighborhood named Toinette Perry. And the reason they recognize her is because the cop, like Jones (who was his partner), moonlighted as a security guard for them.

Since there is little mystery as to what happened, the drama of the episode occurs as we realize the nature of Perry. When we first meet her, she drives up to help Pembleton and Lewis identify the victims and offer her assistance in catching the killer.  We slowly learn (first from Mrs. Jones and then from the officers own jacket) that she is a lousy cop, sloppy in her police work, with extreme paranoid tendencies and a borderline personality. In fact, the only reason that she made the force in the first place is because of Affirmative Action as well as the fact that her father was a councilman, who got the board to overlook her bad psych exam. 

The same qualities that make Perry a lousy cop make her a lousy criminal. Frank and Meldrick easily poke holes in her story, she can not give a reasonable answer to any question and she easily gets flustered.  But we don’t realize the true nature of her evil until we talk with her accomplice--- her cousin, a paroled felon.  He was supposed to rob the place cleanly and later Toinette would show up and screw around with the evidence and witnesses so that he never got caught. Then Toinette came in and without any pretense or reason began shooting everyone in sight. Nor is this even her first murder--- we learn near the end of the episode that she  killed her own father a year ago. What makes all of this even more unsettling is that Perry feels absolutely no remorse for what has happened---  even when she lays the murders on her cousins, its clear she’s more concerned with herself than with the lives that were lost. Camille McMcurty Ali is very unsettling in her portrait of a woman who clearly has no morality or scruples.

The murder is so unsettling that the normally unflappable Dr. Cox is clearly unsettled by the viciousness of the slaughter. Indeed, she is so upset by this particular crime that she openly talks with Mike Kellerman about leaving the M.E.’s office.. Ironically, at this point  Kellerman is seriously considering a career change also. (Perhaps this is a foreshadowing of sorts; by the time the season is over both Cox and Kellerman will be gone from the series) But let’s back up.

Georgia Rae Mahoney, who was released on bail a few weeks ago, has now been set free completely, the chargers against her for both the detective shootings and the Collins’ murders dropped.  One wonders, given the preponderance of evidence how this was even possible; later we will learn that more corruption was involved in her release. Furthermore, Georgia Rae has no intention of leaving Baltimore and, as she made clear in ‘Birthday’ the previous episode, she has every intention of blackmailing and breaking Kellerman about his involvement in the death of Luther.

With Georgia Rae hounding him off the job, and Falsone still hounding him on it (in a slightly unrealistic sequence the two detectives get into a scuffle and end up holding their guns on each other) Mike realizes the enormity of the trouble he is in. He finally confesses the truth to Juliana, who tells him that he can’t  carry this alone; he has to tell Meldrick and Stivers about the videotape Georgia Rae has. He’ll need some time to get there, but when he does neither will  be thrilled. Unfortunately, things are continuing to spiral out of control

For the first time since the ‘Blood Ties’ three-parter, Ballard and Gharty get a story of their own. Unfortunately, compared to Kellerman, it’s a pretty lightweight one. After dining on the local delicacies of Baltimore--- crabcakes--- Laura suffers  anaphylactic shock brought on by an allergic reaction to shellfish. This was something of an in-joke because actress Callie Thorne suffered from food allergies.  The writers probably would have done better to give her some policework (to their credit she’d get a case the following episode)

We also meet one last demi-regular--- Billie Lou, the new bartender at he Waterfront who has a very unique act with a double bass. We’ll be seeing her around a bit more later on.

‘Saigon Rose’ is a pretty disturbing episode in its portrait of a woman with no scruples whatsoever. We have no idea what’s wrong with Toinette Perry and her actions are truly senseless. This is how Homicide  works and even though its not as brilliant as ‘Every Mother’s Son’ or the Mahoney saga, it’s pretty tense anyway.

My score: 4 stars.

Better Late Than Never: Grace & Frankie Season 4

In a world where even the most endearing and delightful series on any service seem to have a short life span, there is something to be said for the old-fashioned comedy series that doesn't seem determined to end any time soon. This is to be expected on network and some cable services which keep their hit shows on the air well past their expiration dates, but is harder to fathom among some of the more involved services, and considering the makeup of most of the cast of Grace & Frankie, it's actually encouraging that the series had already been renewed for Season 5.

As Season 4 begins to unfold, Grace and Frankie have momentarily separated, and when Frankie (Lily Tomlin) returns from Santa Fe to attend her sons baby shower, she is appalled to find that Grace (Jane Fonda) has filled the gap with a slightly younger roommate, her pedicurist Sherrie (Lisa Kudrow, as always, delightful) Sherrie actually has some appealing secrets, and my one regret about the way they resolved her storyline is that, well, they resolved her storyline, but who knows, maybe we'll see her again by the end of the season. It doesn't take long for the two roommates to find their old patterns and new problems. For example, when Frankie trotted off to Santa Fe with her lover Jacob (Ernie Hudson, who I hope will see more of soon) to resolve paperwork in handling her mail, she arranged things so that she declared herself dead. Now that she's returned herself back to LA, more or less permanently, she now has to deal with the ramifications. As she puts it 'by the time I make myself alive, I'll actually be dead."

Grace is undergoing her own problems. The relationship she began with her business rival Nick (Peter Gallagher) has actually become more serious than she is willing to admit, and she finds herself rather amazed to find that Nick actually wants more of her, not less. Given how restrictive she is, one can sense it will end in tears, but there are probably going to be a fair amount of laughs along the way.

Robert and Sol seem to be moving in a solid direction these days. Robert was nominated for a local theater award for his production of 1776,  a storyline that took up much of Season 3. Sol tries to get him to use his winners speech as a call to barricades, and is actually a little bemused when he wins, does call to the barricades.. and forgets to mentions his husband. (Considering that Sam Waterston and Martin Sheen are the leads here, there are definitely layers among layers in this joke.) Then there was the fact that Sol thinks he's found a gay couple as numbers only to find that they're a straight couple - but the husband is clearly closeted. This adds a layer of seriousness to the story that the writers have managed to deal with extremely well in this series.

Grace & Frankie isn't even close to the most popular comedy on Netflix. It's not the hippest show. It's certainly nowhere close to being the best show. But considering the fact that all of the major leads are either at or fast approaching 80, particularly in an age where, even now, we rarely have anyone above 50 in a lead role, it is by far one of the most daring shows on any platform. And considering that it simply wants to make its points in pure unadulterated jokes, there's something very admirable about that, and to be commended. And really, I don't know how long the series can naturally last. What I do know, is this series handles the realties of aging more realistically - and comically - then almost any series I've seen on TV. In one episode, Lisa Kudrow's character says she's had many good friends, but she's never "had a Grace.. or a Frankie, for that matter." Frankly, TV needs more of both. I look forward to the rest of the season, and for Season 5 as well.

My score: 4 stars.

Homicide Episode Guide: Birthday

Written by Julie Martin

Directed by Alison MacLean

In the early stages of Season 6, Homicide was still struggling to find the right balance between the old and the new. With Andre Braugher officially announcing this was his final season, it might have made more sense to give more storylines to the rest of the cast. But when you've got one of the greatest characters in the history of the medium on your payroll, you use him as much as you can. Simultaneously, the writers were still struggling to figure out how to use the newer actors who had joined this season.

'Birthday' is a prime example of how they were moving. For the fourth time in six episodes,  Falsone is given the center of a major storyline. Keeping with the what would quickly become a major theme of Season 6, the victim in the case is a member of the 'living dead'. Grace Rivera is found in a Fells Point alley beaten, raped and near the point of death. Called on to the scene along with Sex Crimes, Falsone, Lewis and Stivers (now having rotated to sex crimes), find themselves fighting for coverage. Falsone, still cocky, guarantees Gee that he will clear this case, something Meldrick tells him in an idiotic thing to do. Falsone manages to strike a rapport with Rivera, who has no memory of the attack or anything that led up her ending up near death. Rivera is the exact obverse of almost every major assault victim you see on TV, particularly the ones that you would see on Law & Order: SVU. She is not shattered or hysterical, but rather grateful to be alive, angry about the investigative process, and when the attacker is caught, reflective on how her lifestyle has basically led to this event.

Rivera is promiscuous (as her roommate, the closest thing to family she has says, "she says you gotta kiss a lot of frogs") and she seems to think that she has made a lot of bad choices in her life. But she doesn't seem like a 'victim' in the same sense that so many rape victims are, or would later be portrayed. She's a good person, and Allison Foland makes her seem real without being tough. Which is why the denouement to the episode comes as such as a shock. Falsone comes to the hospital to tell her that they are about to charge her attacker with attempted murder, and learns from the doctor that she started to have a brain hemorrhage and died on the table. For awhile they made this character come to life, and it hurts to see someone so vital die so inauspiciously. In  other words, it's classic Homicide.

The investigation is more or less Homicide, too. The attacker is not some abusive sex offender, but rather the friendly bartender who let Rivera run a tab. He is caught on the re-canvas, when it turns out the bartender who Lewis talked to the first time lied so she wouldn't get in trouble with her boss. And the bartender never gives any real explanation as to why he attacked Rivera.

For reasons that never made any sense to me, either at the time or now, Jon Seda was considered one of the worst things to happened to Homicide in the final two seasons.  Admittedly, he comes across as overly aggressive at times and often very awkward, but I honestly thought that was part of his charm, at least in Season 6. His dogged personality, and his lack of confidence coming from auto seems natural and very well done, and I thought that much of his work was among the high points of the season.

Frank, in the meantime, is dealing with drama of his own. Mary is way overdue with her second child, and its starting to irk him, to the point where he's confiding in Bayliss.. Tim suggests that they go to a restaurant and get a special kind of salad, which he claims will help induce labor,. Frank thinks this is ridiculous, but takes Mary to a restaurant anyway to get this salad. She ends up going into labor, but there are complications, and she has to have an emergency C-Section. Frank feels a degree of helplessness in the waiting room, and finds himself confiding in Tim to a level he rarely does, claiming that maybe he should've stayed in Robbery, because at least that way he'd have been there for Mary and his daughter. The doctor tells him that he has a healthy son, and he's happy. Had they used this for a reason why Frank would leave the job later on, I would have been content, as it would've been keeping with his character.

But the main reason he will leave the series is the third story, and it involves Kellerman and Georgia Rae Mahoney. Georgia is out on bail (we won't learn how this is possible until the middle of the season) and she starts her season long torment of Kellerman. Luther, for all his sins, was subtle in his machinations; his sister is far more direct. She tells Kellerman that her brother had surveillance cameras in his entire apartment, and she has a videotape of him. Kellerman spends the remainder of the episode finding out there was surveillance, and it would've picked up everything in the apartment where he shot Luther. Georgia continues to taunt him, saying she won't give any information, and this pressure will lead Mike back to drinking. Reed Diamond gives the first of many good performances he will give in his last season, as he begins to drown. Equally good is Hazelle Goodman as Georgia Rae, which makes you really wish the writers had made more use of her.

'Birthday'  is a return to the dark level of Homicide that we have seen,  but there's still a fair lack of balance for the series. The season is now almost a third over, and we've seen precious little of Callie Thorne or Peter Gerety. (The writers will correct this in the next few episodes). It's a good balance of a traditional cop show (there's a hell of an 'A' story, a solid 'B', and a decent 'C'), but considering that Homicide was anything but the traditional cop show, it's something of a letdown. Still Seda, Braugher and Diamond are all excellent, and we seem to be definitely going in the right direction.

My score: 4 stars.

How Shonda Rhimes Continues To Get Away With Murder

The term 'hate-watching' has been in usage for almost a decade, but I can honestly say I never understood what it meant until Shonda Rhimes came into the TV business. Her entire world, which keeps expanding, despite the ever diminishing returns, seems to be based on the worst bits of TV's Golden Age with none of the rewards. I all but gave up on the majority of the craziness of her work two years with one notable exception. If you've read the title of this piece, you know what show it is.

Television has basically become a world where its harder and harder to find any real good guys outside of CBS' procedural dramas. In many ways, this has been an improvement, yet there are time I can't help but long for the days where we had simple good versus evil structures. How To Get Away With Murder would no doubt have you think, like so many series in Shondaland, that there are no good people any more. Certainly, the central characters in Murder are anything but pleasant people, and with each season, they get more and more monstrous. You could make the argument that this is the very mindset behind such brilliant dramas as Breaking Bad, which take a good man and turn him evil. The difference is, there were some truly good people in Walter White's world, and part of the brilliance of the series came when we saw the victims of this evil get ground beneath Heisenberg's Pontiac.

There are no good people in Murder. The central characters are all just various people who do bad things, and spend an entire series trying to have Viola Davis fix it. Everybody in the world of Murder is out for themselves, and when a truly good person gets involved with them, they have no problem sacrificing him to keep themselves safe. There are so many examples of this by now it could be a running gag, but I'll settle for this one.

In the first half of this season, Laurel decided to get revenge on her father for having her boyfriend murdered last season. To do that, she decided to completely bring down his business, and got involved in such an elaborate scheme to get information, it naturally ended up involving the whole Keating crew except Annalyse.  The plan fell apart, when Simon, a douche guy who had been dealing with his own issues - he was an illegal immigrant from Pakistan, and he was gay - found out what they were doing. Laurel panicked, and accidentally shot him in the head. They were all upset about it - for all of an hour - and then, naturally tried to figure out to blame everything on him. So they decided to put everything on a man who was in a coma. Real classy.

Then it got worse in the last two episodes of the season. Simon miraculously came out of his coma, and they found out he remembered everything that had happened. In order to try and save their own asses, they manipulated the situation, so that Annalyse would become his attorney and negotiate a deal for immunity that would allow him to stay in the country. Then in the last episode, Simon got scared, and Michela decided that the best way to protect them was to have him deported. Annalyse and Bonnie saved him. Michela did it anyway. And justified by saying that Annalyse wouldn't do the necessary thing.

I'd say this is the kind of thing that antiheroes do, except Gus Fring and Walter would have just had Mike kill him.  Sending a gay man back to Pakistan is even more horrendous some how. But that's how everybody in Peter Nowalk's and Shonda's world works. There are no good people. But because the stakes are really so low, what we basically see is a world of corruption, where the Keating Four just become more and more ruthless, with no real consequences, moral or otherwise. Michela says to Connor: "Do you think I'm evil?" And Connor answers: "We're all evil." That makes it okay. Seriously. I'd expect this attitude from gangster or meth dealers, but second year law students.  I didn't think attorneys became morally bankrupt til they actually starting practicing.

The real question is, why does Shonda continue to get away with? And the answer is, she isn't. Ratings for all her ABC series have dropped dramatically over the last two seasons. (There's a reason she's heading to Netflix, other than to use the actual obscenity that describes what all the characters on all her series are doing all the time.) Fewer and fewer people are embracing the craziness behind all of the Shondaland series, yet ABC is doing two more series from her world this season alone. I'm starting to feel that basing your entire network on one person and American Idol is  a bad idea. Then I consider all the revivals that are coming.  And I shudder thinking: how long will we have to wait to see Grey's Anatomy: The Next Generation?

Deserves A Life Sentence

Bill Lawrence has always been one of the most criminally undervalued showrunners of the new Golden Age of Television. He began the millennium with the awe-inspiring Scrubs, a comedy series following a hospital intern played by Zach Braff. Brilliantly mixing comedy and poigniancy,  it is probably the closest my generation will ever get to MASH, even if it did stick around a bit too long. Lawrence followed that with the series Cougar Town, a comedy with a title so awful he spent many opening sequences making fun of it. Featuring Courtney Cox as a forty-ish divorcee finding love with a younger man, it managed to delight those few people who saw it. He also developed a wonderful business-centered single-camera series Ground Floor for TBS that was canceled very prematurely.

And now, he returns to his darker days with Life Sentence, yet another whimsical CW series centered around a charming female lead.  Lucy Hale plays Stella Abbott, a twenty-three year woman who at the age of fifteen was diagnosed with cancer. Her family spent the next eight years doing everything in their power to make her last days wonderful. In her twenties, she went to Paris to find her last love, and met Wes, a transplanted Brit, and they had a whirlwind romance that ended with them getting married. The series opens with her preparing for her living funeral. And then... the last treatment works. And she's cured.

This would seem to be the happy ending she'd been looking for, and you can imagine a dozen Hollywood rom-coms ending this way. Unfortunately, this is where things immediately fall apart. For starters, her ultra-supportive family now no longer can paper over the cracks they've been hiding because of Stella's disease. Her parents are about to divorce, because her mother has been having an affair. With Stella's godmother. Understandably, Dad (Dylan Walsh) is not taking it well. Her brother Aiden (Jayson Blair) has spent the last few years selling medication to soccer moms and sleeping with them, and now has knocked one up. Her sister Elizabeth abandoned her lifelong dream of becoming a writer to follow a job she hates because someone needed to make money.

And that's just her family's problem. When you get cancer at fifteen, you pretty much don't consider your education, so Stella doesn't have much of a career in front of her. (She's working as a barista, and she sucks at it.) She's now trying to build a life with her new husband, who she married without considering they'd have a future. Now that they do, they have consider getting kids. And Stella is trying desperately to fix her families problems but its not looking like it will be anywhere near as easy as curing her cancer.

If I'd made this series sound too dark, its not. Like Jane The Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, this series gladly settles into a whimsical style that is delightful. Just as in Scrubs, Stella narrates the series and has many of the fantasy and flashback sequences that made that same show so delightful. I never had much use for Lucy Hale (or Pretty Little Liars, for that matter) but performance and delivery is so charming that I can understand why so many people find her appealing, and the rest of the cast is as good.

Bill Lawrence has, as I mentioned, created a great many delightful series. What he has yet to do is create a truly successful show. Even when Scrubs was immediately after Friends, he couldn't get 10 million viewers to watch it, and Cougar Town's numbers were so low, it had to hop from ABC to TBS mid-run. The early numbers for Life Sentence are not promising, either; its barely getting a million viewers, and I don't expect things to get much better when Empire returns from its hiatus. The CW has always had more patience for keeping even the lowest rated of its series on the air then even some of the more prominent basic cable providers. I really hope this show gets that same kind of patience, because much like its plucky heroine, I want this show to live and thrive.

My score:4.25 stars.

Homicide Episode Guide: Baby, It's You

A Homicide/Law & Order crossover

Written by Jorge Zamacona

Directed by Ed Sherin

Considering the  ratings that the first Law and Order/Homicide crossover generated (they were among the best ratings in either shows history), it seems only natural that NBC wanted a sequel. The fact that the producers of both shows (Tom Fontana and Dick Wolf) waited so long explains how many obstacles there were in filming the first one. (Indeed, things could have gotten even more complicated considering that both producers considered including ER in the mix. It’s a good thing the show declined; filming in two different cities is hard enough, adding Hollywood would have probably made things all but impossible) A critical decision was reached when Wolf managed to agree that the  story be a two-part tale told across both shows, rather then two separate self-contained stories. In other words, to understand the whole story, viewers had to watch both shows. (This led to syndication problems that would not be resolved until 2004, when TNT aired both episodes on its network)

‘Baby, It’s You’ was a far different animal than the previous crossover. Unlike the previous story, it continued a practice of Law & Order  of adapting stories from the shows headlines--- in this case, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. The show begins with the suspicious death of Brittany Janaway, a fourteen-year old supermodel. It appears as if Brittany has died from toxic shock brought on by what appears to be a vicious sexual assault. Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis try to investigate the death while under a huge amount of media attention, brought on by the death and the parents of the deceased. From the beginning, the investigation is compromised by a series of leaks to the press, amplified by the suspicious behavior of the Janaways themselves. They and their attorney Leslie Drake (memorably played by the master of disreputable characters Dan Hedaya) do everything in their power to turn attention away from them, including the offer of $250,000 reward for information, and the private hiring of a criminal profiler. All of this seems to be a way of keeping the attention of them, which only adds to their suspicion.

Eventually, the trail leads to Baltimore, another city the Janaways call home.  This time, instead of trying to bypass the PD, Briscoe calls Munch and asks him for assistance, tracking a lead. Munch isn’t wild about helping the cop who slept with his ex, but he is a lot more congenial then the single-minded Pembleton. He and Falsone investigate and learn that Brittany may have been raped in Baltimore and that a suspect (the son of a former babysitter)  was there that day. Showing an asperity we don’t normally associate with him, Ed Danvers sends the detectives to New York to interrogate him, and if necessary, extradite him. This time around the atmosphere is a lot more comfortable than it was in ‘Charm City’, as Munch and Falsone are on their best behavior. The mystery increases when the suspect says that he followed her to the Janaway house in Baltimore and saw her being raped by someone--- he doesn’t know who.

When the story changes series, the Janways have fled the media circus that they helped incite and returned to Baltimore. It quickly becomes clear that Dr. Janaway is under suspicion for literally raping his daughter to death. For the first time in a very long time, Homicide  focuses its energy on points of law. Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) wants jurisdiction over the case because of depraved indifference by the father.  Danvers wants to prosecute in Baltimore because the crime fits the pattern of felony-murder. The court makes a split-ruling--- the case is tried in Baltimore, but McCoy is allowed to co-chair the prosecution.

The episode focuses on Zeljko Ivanek for the first time this season, and seeing him in action with McCoy is a vivid contrast on how both shows regard the D.A. McCoy is a relentless, righteous and zealous prosecutor, willing to twist the law in order to punish the guilty--- not unlike Pembleton in some cases. (In several episodes of Law & Order, we have seen McCoy bend, if not completely break the law, to get a conviction and it has had repercussions) Danvers, on the other hand, is level-headed and professional. He wants to win, not punish. If he can avoid the risks of a trial, he will do so in order to see that some justice is carried out. Danvers is more pedestrian but also more realistic a character than McCoy in that regard. Watching the two of them interact is new territory for Homicide and it gives Ivanek some good screen time.

In essence, this episode is more like Law & Order than Homicide. To the extent that Homicide is involved, it focuses on Ivanek, Jon Seda, and Richard Belzer—and since we don’t see a lot of Ivanek or Belzer normally, it’s a welcome change.

The major twist comes when the defendant reveals that he had an alibi for the time of the murder--- he was having an encounter with a woman he was having an affair with for the past ten years.  Unfortunately, the action from this episode starts falling afterwards. Through interrogations it is reveal that Mrs. Janaway sexually abused her daughter regularly and was responsible for the assault that killed her. Problem is, we haven’t had so much as an inkling of this so far and we don’t get any real explanation as to why she did it. This is like a lot of Homicide but in this case the build-up has been so great it’s a disappointment to just get this.

Still, there are things to admire in this episode. Among them is the chemistry that Lennie Briscoe and Munch share. They have a good rapport and its good to see them doing more than arguing about John’s first wife. (Belzer had a busy week; the same week this crossover aired, he also appeared in an episode of The X-Files) Also interesting is the performance of Seda. He goes after the killer of Brittany Janaway with a  fervor that is on the level of Bayliss. He can be intense, but unlike some of the other detectives he isn’t world-weary enough to believe that a man is capable of raping his daughter to death. (One could see part of the reason Wolf would cast him nearly twenty years later in Chicago P.D.) His talks with McCoy about this are among the better parts of the show. During the course of this episode a minor storyline sets up that he is divorced and has a three year old son. Throughout the season we will see him fight for shared custody of him.

‘Baby It’s You” works better as an episode of Law & Order  than Homicide. We don’t get anywhere near the character stories that we usually get (of the rest of the Homicide cast, only Lewis and Giardello get any significant screen time) and the story’s resolution is unsatisfactory. There’s some good acting from Maureen Anderman and Tom Tammi as the Janaways, but they spend most of the episode as if they are in some kind of fog. The trial is somewhat disjointed and, like most of Homicide’s ventures into  the courtroom, seems out of place despite Ivanek and Waterston’s work. The episode is little more than above average, which makes it the least of the three Law and Order/Homicide crossovers.
Law & Order: 3.75 stars
Homicide: 3.25 stars.
Average: 3.5 stars.

Atlanta: Robbin' Season Review

When Atlanta debuted in the fall of 2016, it was justifiably hailed as one of the most brilliant comedy series to come about in years, and there is a very good reason for that. Donald Glover, the creative force behind it, has always been one of the most incredible comedic and genius force. Painting a world of the African-American just trying to get by on the edge of poverty row, he creating not just some of the more indelible characters and comedic scenarios (in perhaps the most ambitious episode, Glover created a cross between BET and PBS with commercials that satirically pointed out the black experience at a level that not even Saturday Night Live has accomplished), but in getting the most ambitious look at the urban experience since the early days of The Wire.

In one of the great understatements of all time, a lot has changed since then, not the least for Glover himself. He won a fistful of awards from every major critics group in the world, including two Emmys (he was the first African-American to win for directing), and getting cast as the young Lando in the new Han Solo movie. Understandably, it has taken more than a year for Season 2 of Atlanta to get written.  It has been more than worth the way.

Despite the fact that Earn (Glover) has managed to launch a modestly successful rap career for Paper Boi/Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), this has not translated into huge amounts of money for anyone, least of all Earn. He's still living from couch to couch, still trying to get away from a house arrest, and still trying to get by, which is why he's so delighted to get $4000 in gift cards from a local mall. But things have not getting any easier for this Princeton dropout. He still finds himself in absurd situations, including getting trapped in a house with his uncle, Alligator Man (Katt Williams, and he's called Alligator Man for a very good reason, or in this musical launch party, which says all the right things, but everybody watches him when he's not looking. Things haven't gone much easier for Alfred. He's now so famous that his regular pot dealer decides to rob him (very ineptly) and its becoming harder and harder for him to try and get some actual money to go with his fame, and he is really irritated when his number 1 single gets parroted back to him. Which is always happening.

Season 2 is subtitled Robbin' Season, and there's a legitimate reason. In just the first two episodes, we've seen four separate burglaries, all of which are amusing but also galling in a strange way. As Darius tells Earn in the season premiere: "the closer it gets to Christmas, the more poor people start robbing other people to pay for gifts, which gets them in jail.." and I can't do justice (or print) most of the rest of that sentence. More to the point, there are far darker undertones to everything. At one point, Darius tells Earn the urban legend of 'Florida Man', an apocryphal story of the man from Florida capable of the most horrible crimes and atrocities, whose sole purpose is 'to stop black people from moving to Florida, and registering to vote." The fact that every black man in Atlanta knows who he is would seem to just make you wonder. And in the first episode, Earn got a gold-plated gun from his uncle "which you're going to need if you're in the rap game." Which makes you wonder: did Earn ever read Chekhov?

Atlanta is a dark, urban series disguised as a comedy, much in the same way Get Out was a study of race relations disguised (albeit brilliantly) as a horror film.  Even if your not its intended audience (and I can assure you that I'm not) you will find yourself laughing (and wincing) at some of the touchstones in life that resonate. And all of this makes you wonder, this all seems to have taken place in the Obama era.  What happens when Robbin Season ends? More importantly, who's going to fire that gun?

My score: 4.5 stars,

One, Two, Three Anti-Heroines: Good Girls Review

About six months ago, I wrote a series of articles for this website in which I argued about the lack of female leads of series who could be as dark as Tony Soprano or Walter White. Now, I find myself more than a little surprised to see a series that has not one, but three female leads with the possibility to be real anti-heroines. Even more astonishing, the series is on NBC, which has been undergoing a creative and popular resurgence over the past couple of years (thank you, This is Us). But is Good Girls really at that level, or is trying to be a pale imitation?

The series focuses on three Michigan women who are all struggling with interior problems nearly as big. Beth (Christina Hendricks) is a forty-ish housewife with four kids, who just found out that not only is her car-dealer husband cheating on her with a woman half his age, he's mortgaged their house to pay bad loans.  Annie, her younger sister, (Mae Whitman) is barely scraping buy at her minimum wage job at a grocery store, trying to support her child, and her much richer ex (Zach Gilford) is suing her for custody. And Ruby (Retta) actually has a happy marriage and a daughter who loves her. Unfortunately, she has a kidney disease, and needs treatment and they have no insurance.

When all of these events form a perfect storm, the three woman team to rob Annie's grocery store just to get $30, 000 to pay their bills. Unfortunately, the grocery store is under the management of drug dealers who are using it to launder money. So, there's more than ten times that when they get there. And when the drug dealers find out who robbed them, they want their money back with interest.

This may not seem like the easiest plot for a series, but then again, neither did the Pilot for Breaking Bad. What makes Good Girls a little harder to see working is the fact that none of the three women seem willing to go 'all in' yet. At the end of the pilot, Annie's boss at the mini-mart tried to blackmail her, then got drunk, and tried to rape her. Beth then pointed a gun at him, and he seemed to get killed. Everything got set up so that he was probably going to be their first dead body. Except it turned out that Beth and Anne had grabbed him, and hogtied him in a playset. Eventually, they let him go, and arrange things so that he might end up charged as a sex offender should he ever talk about what happened to him. But it's clear that the showrunners still seem to be hedging their bets a little. When the drug dealers prepare to execute the three of them, Beth frantically talks them out of it by telling them: "We're good people! And when good people get killed like this, people pay attention!) They still seem to be holding to that.

I am, however, more inclined to give this series a little more latitude because of my utter confidence in the leads. All three actresses have done some truly remarkable work in the second Golden Age, and I am particularly glad to see Whitman, who has been a tremendous actress for nearly twenty years (!) , finally playing an actual adult. The women are more easily relatable than so many of male antiheroes, which may be good for the series run. Will Good Girls continue to work? I'm not sure. But it does represent a step in the right direction, and these actresses are very good at their jobs.

My score: 3.5 stars.

Homicide Episode Guide: The Subway

Written by James Yoshimura

Directed by Gary Fleder

Perhaps because the producers of Homicide  thought that they were being viewed by the executives at NBC as a ‘dead letter’, they would feature in season 6 a sizable number of stories that highlight living people who had been ‘murdered’--- just not cold yet. And not in the same way Sean Garrabrek  in ‘A Doll’s Eyes’ was either--- these people were still fighting and alive.  Many of these episodes would be moving, but few would be as powerful as the first one written but was ultimately shown out of order --- ‘The Subway’. Indeed, this show is not only one of the most compelling of the season, but one of the best episodes in series history.

In the previous five seasons, it seemed that Homicide  had looked at grief and shock of murder from every angle imaginable. Turns out they left one out--- the victim.  John Lange leaves for his job one Friday morning, kisses his girlfriend goodbye, enters the subway, walks down the platform--- and falls in front of an oncoming train. He gets pinned between the train and the platform. The pressure of the subway is the only thing keeping his insides from falling out. The instant the pressure is eased, he will die. Without it, he’ll live maybe an hour. Everyone--- the paramedics, the police, and Detective Frank Pembleton---  knows that he’s going to die. 

So does John Lange. He is still conscious, and because his spinal cord has been severed, he doesn’t feel any pain. It therefore comes as a huge shock when Pembleton tries to talk to him about getting his girlfriend down to the subway to say goodbye. We watch him as he realizes what is going to happen, and it is stunning. This is a huge shock, not only for the viewer but for Frank. Like all detectives, he sees the dead, not the death. He may speak for the dead, but he doesn’t speak with the dead. And that’s what Frank does for an hour--- he asks him about next of kin, getting his account of what happened, and finally contemplating the fate of a man who is dying because he chose to ride the subway into work instead of driving in like he does every other day.

It is not easy to watch a man die. Our  relief from this agony comes from the comparatively less grim efforts to find out why Lange fell and trying to reach next of kin. Bayliss spends the hour learning about the man who pushed him is a lunatic who had spent time in an institution for pushing another man in front of a train. Falsone and Lewis get called in on what is ultimately a futile search for Lange’s girlfriend who is jogging by the river and every few minutes we get some release as the detectives make  the effort. The only relief that Lange gets is the ‘one-in-a-million’ chance from the paramedic that he will somehow survive the removal.

But there are no miracles---or relief. This is Homicide. Lange’s death is random and arbitrary. Falsone and Meldrick never locate his girlfriend, so he never gets to say goodbye. Lange succumbs on the platform.  For everyone else--- even the rattled Frank Pembleton--- life must go on. The train starts running. And Lange’s girlfriend jogs by just in time to see the firemen and the paramedics pull away from the station---- leaving with only a cursory look. It is the ultimate ironic twist.

To merely summarize this episode robs it of its power. It is essentially a static scene, yet the emotion and anguish that we see is absolutely unforgettable. This may be Andre Braugher’s finest hour, and considering his body of work, that’s saying a lot. For once, his role is not that of grand inquisitor, but that of caregiver and confessor. He will be the last person that John Lange will ever talk to, and he must keep the victim calm, relate to this man, while keeping his own emotions in check. It is an extraordinary work. Braugher would win his only Emmy this season, and while I don’t know if this was the episode that he submitted for consideration, its hard to imagine a better example of his range and ability.

Just as brilliant is the work of Vincent D’Onofrio  as John Lange. The range and power of his performance is astonishing--- he shows more human emotion in this one hour than he has ever done in almost his entire career as the lead  on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. His work is riveting and absolutely unforgettable. Watching a ‘dead man’ go through the five stages of grief is not something that is easily forgotten and D’Onofrio pulls it out without a hint of overacting. This is the work of an astonishing performer.

‘The Subway’ may be the most famous episode of a remarkable series. The praise from critics bordered on the extraordinary. It received two Emmy nominations---  Best Guest Actor for D’Onofrio and Best Teleplay, plus probably Braugher’s. It would win an unprecedented third Peabody award for the series and an Edgar nomination for best teleplay.   It would later be featured on a PBS episode of ‘Frontline’. But its force and performance are among the greatest of any episode of television that I’ve ever seen. Never has it been more clear that a murder means that a man is dead. For those reasons I consider ‘The Subway’ one of the best episodes of television--- ever.  And even then, it’s only one of five episodes of the series that I consider the highlights of the series. That’s how high the writers and actors of Homicide set the bar.

My score: 5 stars.

Rank by Fans: 5^th