From In The Dark, Light for the CW

The CW is in a transitional phase. Its biggest successes, Arrow and Supernatural, will be coming to an end next year. Its biggest critical darlings Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are either ending or over. And some of the series that were modest successes, iZombie and Legends of Tomorrow are in their final phases as well.

The network, despite being the home of some of the more engaging series on network television over the 2010s, has never quite fulfilled its potential. Most of this is due to the overwhelming presence of Greg Berlanti and the so called Arrow-verse. Once the greatest strength of the network, it has rapidly become heavy handed and lacking energy. Nevertheless, more and more series in that world keep getting greenlit, leaving less room for actually original programming, and what comes up is basically reboots of earlier WB successes – Charmed and Roswell being the most obvious examples. There doesn’t seem to be much room on the CW for characters that don’t have some form of supernatural power.

Which brings us to In the Dark. Every so often, the CW will try a series centered around a female protagonist who is deliberately different in the tradition of the antiheroines out there.  Sometimes, it works and we get Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Sometimes, it misfires, and we get Life Sentence. In the Dark is somewhere in between, but the one thing you can say for certain is that is that the lead is not Supergirl, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Murphy Mason is a blind woman unlike any we’ve seen on any medium. She is abrasive, hard-drinking, and the king of one-night stands. She barely gets along with her lesbian roommate, Jess. Her mother (Kathleen York, one of The West Wing’s hidden weapons) can hardly stand her, which makes the fact that they work together at a shelter for seeing-eye dogs even more unpleasant. The only person that she seems able to handle at all is Tyson, a man who saved her life when she got mugged in an alley years earlier. Which is why she takes it so hard when he disappeared, and she believes she found his body in that same alley.

No one else believes her, particularly because when she comes back the body is missing, but more importantly, its because of her personality. Murphy is angry at the world, and seems absolutely unwilling to take on the help of anyone who would even think of helping her. She is so desperate to make sure we don’t feel sorry for her that she doesn’t everything possible to make herself an island.  So when she tells a possibly sympathetic cop (Rich Sommer of Mad Men) , he isn’t inclined to give  her more than the time of day, and only because his daughter recently lost her sight. Tyson’s cousin, Darnell doesn’t seem worried about her, and its becoming increasingly clear that Tyson was mixed up in his family’s world of drugs. Murphy seems determined to try and figure out what happen to Tyson on her own, even though she is the least suited person to this job and everyone keeps telling her that.

I can say with some degree of certainty that there has never been a character quite like Murphy on television, even in the world of Nancy Botwin and Jackie Peyton. Murphy has managed to adjust to the world of sightlessness, but that barely makes her a tolerable human being. In the Pilot, she gets caught in the midst of an adulterous affair in a way that wrecks a possible charitable contribution to her family. In last night’s episode, after have sex with a man who calls her ‘mom’ during coitus, she gets an UTI, and because her medical bill is overdue, she ends up having to take the same treatment dogs would. When an actual nice guy ventured to ask her out on a date, she only does so because she wants information about Tysoon’s family, and seems unwilling to even consider him anything but someone who wants to pity-date the blind girl. Perry Mattfield is very strong in this role, raising memories of the equally gifted Jennifer Carpenter both in appearance and in attitude.

Now, I’ll be honest. I can’t say with certainty that In the Dark will work. Murphy is no Jessica Fletcher or even Veronica Mars. And at this point in the series, the mystery is still the weakest point of the show. But it has one of the better female protagonist in the rare network that actually has a lot of women led series. And with its jagged sensebilities and rough sense of humor, you can say that it belongs on this network in a way few other shows do. This is the kind of experimental series that the CW should be doing at this point. And I hope that the network heads have the same patience for this they had with Jane and Crazy.

My score: 3/75 stars.