This review is going to take a bit
longer than some of my previous ones and this is intentional.
Those of you who have read my blog
know that when Alert: Missing Persons Unit debuted in January 2023 I
dismissed it because I thought the underlying storyline – two parents being
confronted with their missing son after several years but who are unable to
recognize him – was so fundamentally ridiculous that after three episodes I
abandoned the show. After I heard the storyline had been resolved when it was
renewed for a second season I watched it as more of a time-filler than anything
else.
To my immense surprise the second
season was immensely better than the first. Freed from its ridiculous storyline
it became a far more satisfying, albeit traditional procedural. After seeing
the first two episodes I would watch the entire second season and found it, if
not a masterpiece, at the very least one of the better series on network TV.
The fact that it had improved so immensely both as a procedural, with character
development and a far superior series of underlying storyline, was a revelation
compared to almost every series I’ve ever watched with inevitably start like
gangbusters and far too often fall apart in later seasons, if not during the
sophomore one. I was overjoyed when it was renewed for a third season and I’ve
spent much of the last few months eagerly awaiting its return.
Then it came back last month – and I
had to deal with something I haven’t had to confront on a TV series in a very
long time.
In the era of Peak TV the average
viewer has gotten so used to characters being killed off on cable and streaming
that they might well have forgotten that during much of television history they
were frequently killed off for less flattering reasons – the actor involved
wanted to be written of the show or behind the scenes arguments became so heated
that the character was killed off. In recent years we’ve learned that
frequently minority characters were killed off because of arguments with the
showrunners (almost always white male) but it’s recently been revealed that it
occurs in the world of Shondaland far too often – and she has been more than
willing to do so for female characters and actors of color as well as white
actors. (Killing off McDreamy is still a bridge too far for me and I imagine
most viewers as well.) Because I’ve mostly avoided Shondaland and other procedurals
I haven’t really encountered clear instances of this in at least a decade. But
I suspect that may very well have been a factor in Season 3 of Alert.
At the end of Season 2 Nikki (Diara
Ramirez) and Mike Sherman (Ryan Broussard) finally got married after two
seasons. It was an event anticipated since the pilot and it was a clear sign of
how much the series has changed. Jason Grant (Scott Caan) had gotten divorced
from Nikki years ago and had been brought back at the start to help the MPU. While
there was some initial tension between all three of them, by the time Season 2
ended the conflicts had all been resolved and Mike was willing to serve as Ryan’s
best man at their wedding. It was one of the more cheerful moments watching TV
all year – which makes what happened at the start of Season 3 seem all the more
bizarre.
In the second episode of Season 3
Nikki Grant was assaulted by a parolee she’d once put away who’d just been
released. We didn’t see Ramirez in the episode and her name had been removed
from the credits, neither of which was a good sign. As the episode went on it
became clear that Nikki had decided to meet with the FBI to inform on a
Philadelphia crime boss who had been using her and who in the previous episode
she had helped work to rescue his daughter from an abduction. Mike and Jason
had both warned Charlie at the end of the first episode and it seemed like this
might be the set-up for the arc of Season 3.
So when Nikki’s body was found at
the end of the episode – murdered by Charlie’s triggerman - it really seemed like a plot device to deal
with the fact that Ramirez had been written out of the show. The fact that
Ramirez is a woman of a color doesn’t strike me as a coincidence; this has been
a recurring pattern throughout network television for many years though I hoped
it was over with. That it happened so abruptly and without warning makes me
believe that we will learn more about this in the weeks and months to come.
I’ve spent the last two weeks trying
to figure out how I can review this show when it seems pretty clear to me there’s
a cloud under eliminating a major character in a way so clumsy. The fact that Alert
is a procedural helps more than the last time I encountered something this
clumsy on a series: Ruth Wilson’s Alison being killed off on the fourth season
of The Affair. (I’ve written about this quite a few times over the years
so I won’t relitigate it here.) On a purely stylistic level Alert is
still basically working at the same level it did in Season 2.
The last two episodes have proceeded
with a rhythm that we frequently see on network shows when a major character disappears.
Both Jason and Mike have gone back to work in order to deal with the grief of
losing the woman they both loved. Caan is doing better work than usual during
this period as we see a man who is dealing with a huge trauma again but is now
trying to help his partner and his friend who has basically been burying it. He
knows that this isn’t something he’s good at, so while he’s doing his best to
ask the right questions he also basically tries to pretend everything is
normal, and that means the typical giving his partner the business and
humiliating him as part of the job. (In the first episode after they came back in
order to see a doctor Jason pretended Mike was a partner who needed to see
someone because he’d contracted a form of VD, something that Mike knew about but
couldn’t react too while undercover.)
Mike has been clearly burying the
trauma and it may very well come back to bite him – indeed that may be the
underlying story of Season 3. But at this point he has thrown himself into his
work and is trying to do everything to reunite people with their families. At
this point he’s taking more risks in the partnership that the usually ‘throw
the rules in the garbage’ Jason which has led to some interesting dynamics so
far.
And the cases, aside from the one
involving Nikki’s disappearance, have been at their usual level of interest.
Helping things along is a new recurring character, played by Malcolm
Jamal-Warner as an inspector with a military background. Warner has been superb
in his initial appearance, particularly last night’s when a former colleague of
his from overseas went missing. He went out of his way to deal with protocol
even as he made it clear how important it was, impressing the unit in a way
most bosses haven’t. When a deeper storyline revealed the victim’s husband –
who’d come back from Iraq with a missing leg and had been dealing with so much
trauma – had been indirectly involved he was met with sympathy for his actions more
than usual both from the MPU and Jason, who knew first hand the trauma of
coming back from overseas. The story had a more action based climax then we’re
used to from the show but perhaps that was inevitable given the level of the
conflict and it had a solid emotional reward at the end.
Much of what made Alert work in
Season 2 is still very much in play in Season 3. The team is still incredibly
professional, Caan and Broussard have a superb back-and-forth that is amusing (and
something we rarely see outside the world of Law & Order these days)
and the tech workers still have agreeable quirks that I appreciate. I really
love the lab tech who is a Gilbert and Sullivan fan and who loves to sing in
her lab and there are times where that really pays off. (I was tickled when
being there to arrest a major she sang: “I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General’
as she led him to lock-up.) But I’m not entirely certain that the show can
easily recover from the loss of Ramirez, who was very much the beating heart of
the first two seasons. Right now, it’s still working pretty well despite it but
I’m not sure that this is one missing person the show can recover from. We’ll
have to wait and see.
My score: 3.75 stars.
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