Disappointed critics of the TV show “Blindspot” have suggested that it devolved to a
mere police-procedural.
Actually it is not that: it
is less than that, aspiring to be more than that.
A police procedural is of interest only if it actually gives you a glimpse of the procedures of
the police (or FBI, or whoever).
Tradecraft above all. As
such, the Police Procedural, as a genre, is inherently neither more nor less
interesting than insights into any other walk of life, such as:
* Plumber’s Procedural
This week, we learn how to really unclog a toilet.
* Philologist’s Procedural
This week, we meet a ferociously irregular verb.
* Penguin Procedural
Last week, we mostly just stood
around motionless, just like the week before, and the week before that. This week, we finally go get some
fish.
On “Blindspot”, we see no real police-work at all. The solution is handed to the team on a
platter, based on the tattoos plus less a four seconds’ worth of
mumbo-jumbo. And that is all as
well. If you’re not going to do it
right, don’t do it at all -- don’t waste screen-time. Forensically, each episode’s crime-of-the-week is no more than a featureless pushpin
on a wall-map. The question
is whether that wall-map will eventually develop an interesting pattern.
~
As pure a specimen of a broadcast police procedural as you might hope to find, was the old “Dragnet”
radio series of the 1950s. I used
to savor its re-runs on “The Big Broadcast” (Ed Walker, God rest your soul). Though one may doubt how closely the
scripts hewed to actual LAPD cases, they were conformable in pattern, in that
they were -- basically boring.
No moles, no Dickensian witnesses from the past, very little gunplay
(the cops might be investigating some previous gunplay, but you didn’t hear it
in flashback), no interesting intricacy of plot. Just the sort of dumb crimes that the sort of dullards who
become petty criminals typically
perpetrate. It took a sort of
heroism to stick with that formula, week after week and year after year -- just
as the actual flatfeet on the beat had to do. They did not
save the planet weekly, in fiction or in fact, based on helicopter gunships and
cool cryptic naked-lady tattoos.
~
[Update 3 November 2015] As the series lazily unrolls, it becomes apparent that it
owes less than nothing to the humdrum but workmanlike procedurals. Unfortunately, the genre it most
resembles is computerized role-player
games. As there, there are
indefinitely many bad-guys to shoot, like ducks in a gallery: you can always do it, despite the fact
that they are armed with automatic weapons and you with just a service
revolver, because they contain nor flesh nor blood -- unlike reality, they
can’t really shoot back. In Episode 6, a refreshingly skeptical badguy
comments, to the FBI team, astray in the greenwood: “What is this, a scavenger hunt?” Well, exactly. To your right, there lies a mailbox; or, a
dwarf offers you a key: in this
case, the payoff was a trunk full of automatic weapons plus a treasure map that
led to a fully-fueled spanking-new helicopter waiting for your convenience in a
meadow, under a tarp. A deux ex machina that probably went down
very well with a generation that lives in daily expectation of having cool
stuff handed to them free.
[Update March 2016]
I finally gave up on it.
The program having by now amply demonstrated that Tattoo Girl is far
smarter and more capable than any of the men around her, is now reduced (by way
of nearest variation) to demonstrating the similar superiority of what’s-her-name
(which I forgot; she is referred
to only by a business-like surname, but of course otherwise has all the babe
stigmata) to whatever straw-Man is standing around waiting to be put smartly in
his place -- his Y chromosome dangling from his neck like a leper’s bell.
At the latest such instance, I discreetly pushed a buzzer at
my desk, and the whole show dropped disappearing through a trap-door in the
floor.
[Update April 2016]
Curious nevertheless to see if any dots were getting connected, I glanced
at Wikipedia’s summaries recent episodes.
They may be summarized thus:
In the next episode, the shark jumps the monkey, and then they have sex.
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