When I saw the ads for Fox’s
The Cleaning Lady last January, I have to admit the idea intrigued me.
The idea of a Cambodian immigrant who, while trying to earn money to get her
son a kidney transplant, becomes involved with a New Mexico crime family was
certainly different from so many of the procedurals and reboots that make up
most of network TV today. But I’d been
down this road with Fox before, first with Filthy Rich in 2020 and The
Big Leap in 2021. I knew better than to get involved with an interesting
sounding Fox network series which had an interesting concept and no audience.
So, despite the mostly positive reviews, I left it alone. Then in the summer it
was renewed for another season and actually got nominated by the HCA for Best Network
Drama. I grant you the field keeps getting slimmer but it’s not like they’ve
stirred me wrong on a lot of things. So this week, I decided to start watching
and while it will never be mistaken for the antihero led dramas that make up
Peak TV, that’s not necessarily a shortcoming.
The Cleaning Lady is based on an
Argentine telenovela. In this version Elodie Yung plays Thony, a doctor in
Cambodia who the immigration system, like it has for almost everyone, has
failed. By a series of bad luck, she
ends up on the scene of a Latino crime family run by Arman Morales. Desperate
to stay alive and to save her son, she agrees to help him avoid the law. In the
midst of this she ends up on the radar of the FBI in the person of Agent
Garrett (Oliver Hudson is still finding his way through this role.) Walking a
tightrope, she managed to reach a position where she was trusted with the
Morales family’s crypto in the season finale. Then her estranged husband showed
up and angry with what was going on, took her son from her home.
In the midst of the search for her son in the Season
2 Premiere, she managed to track him and her husband down to a motel. There was
an argument involving her and two of her in-laws and her husband was pushed
down the stairs and died. Even though it was an accident, Thony knows far too
well how the justice systems treats people like her, so she cleaned up the
crime scene and staged it as a robbery. This is a major burden for Chris, her
nephew who shoved him and is still dealing with the trauma. It does not help
matters that her father and mother-in-law have come to America to bury their
son, blame her for what happened and seem determined to bring him back to
Cambodia.
The Morales, despite her loyalty, still treat her as
little more than help. This is made fundamentally clear when Nadia calls her
before the funeral and tells her that she has to deliver a bribe to a judge. “You’re
going to do this, so I don’t have to bury my husband,” she says before hanging
up. This has led her on the radar of Armond, Nadia’s ex-boyfriend who has
secured the loan to pay the bail. Charming in front of his ex-lover, he is
utterly ruthless when Thony comes up to get the money forcing her strip not only
front of him but in front of a window in his casino. Naveen Andrews is the new
highpoint for this series, continuing the run of superb performances that
started with The Dropout. I like watching him play what appears to be
this series’ Gus Fring.
There are levels of The Cleaning Lady that
work very well and some that don’t. The fact that Thony is essentially able to
function invisibly throughout the world of crime (“Nobody looks at the cleaning
lady” she says more than once) is perhaps the most subtle and devastating commentary
about how America views almost every minority who works in the menial jobs they
can get. The fact that it is far easier
for Thony to function in the criminal world than she ever could in the
legitimate one is a shining light on just how bad is for the undocumented is
the country. At no point do we get the idea that Thony is enjoying being good
at this the way that Walter White clearly did – she is doing this strictly to
survive and hopefully to come out the other side. (She hopes to open a clinic
with the money she makes from the Morales family.) The series also makes it
perfectly clear that neither the authorities nor much of the crime world care
very much about Thony, save for what she can do to help them which is hardly a
ringing endorsement for how investigations work. Thony has been into deep for
awhile now; the question is only can she avoid drowning. I also like the series
idea to make the lead character an Asian immigrant than the obvious choice of Latino,
which is a bell that has been rung far too often. We get a far clearer picture
of Asian rituals in a way we really don’t in almost any other media.
The series works best when it sticks to following
Thony, her family and friends and how much deeper they get. Much of the rest of
The Cleaning Lady is watered-down Golden Age TV. How the
Morales run their empire, Arman’s struggle to survive in prison (eventually
killing his mentor) and how Nadia is as ruthless as her husband is nothing we
haven’t seen on series like Breaking Bad and Ozark. Nor are things radically different from how
the FBI runs the case: the investigation involves a corrupt judge and we have
learned that Garrett was previously demoted for having an affair with an
informant. Also the series doesn’t seem able to use Liza Weill to her potential,
which in itself should be a criminal offense.
I am not yet prepared to go so far as to call The
Cleaning Lady great television, but I am willing to give it high marks for
the different way it looks at the crime drama. There is precedent for success
in this field – I still miss Good Girls, the NBC drama that had an
interesting perspective on how three working mothers get in to deep with a
crime lord. The fact that Fox was willing to take a chance on it for a second
season may say more for the state of broadcast TV rather than the fact that
they had faith in the series. For now, I’m going to hope that they continue to
demonstrate more in the latter and that we see more series like this on Fox in
the foreseeable future. God know, network TV needs them.
My score: 3.75 stars.
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