Stop The Brooding! A Plea For Happy TV Cops

I'm a budding Miami Vice​ fan, and in 2013 that means that, eventually, your father will give you the complete Crime Story​ on DVD. A short-lived Michael Mann joint that premiered in 1986, Crime Story​ was stylish, ambitious and—as soon as it was pitted head-to-head against Moonlighting​—doomed to fail. Two things struck me about the show's movie-length pilot. First, "Runaway" is an awesome theme song. Seriously. Take a look:​

Features Del Shannon - Runaway

But I was even more pleasantly surprised by the relationship between Lt. Mike Torello—played by the expertly mustachioed Dennis Farina—and his wife. ​Namely, they had one. In the first few episodes, they fight about, the screw a bit, and they decide to have a kid. It's honest, everyday stuff—and a nice contrast from the nihilistic battle against crime that occupies the rest of Torello's waking life. Of course, it doesn't last.

Because the TV gods demand sacrifices, the Torello's happy partnership goes on the rocks quickly, and they're broken up by episode ten. This is a shame not just because Dennis Farina has the kind of sad-guy face that makes you want to give him a hug, but because there are nearly no good cop marriages on TV, and I think that's a shame. Let's consider some candidates for happiness:

• Vic Mackey, The Shield​. What starts as a surprisingly durable marriage—able to survive the pressures caused by two autistic children and Mackey's incredibly bald head—eventually cracks under the weight of his sadism. I'm surprised it lasted that long.
• Kima Greggs, The Wire​. When we meet Kima, she and her longtime girlfriend Cheryl are happy in a very realistic way. Because it's The Wire​, that can't last. Over the next five season, they have ups and downs—mostly downs. It's an honest depiction of a relationship dying, but that's not what I want. I want one that's thriving.
• Hank Schrader, Breaking Bad​. Hank's marriage has been held together by the strongest adhesive imaginable: a fiendish duct tape of denial and borderline behavior. The marriage endures, but it's certainly not happy.

I realize that being a cop's husband or wife is famously difficult. The irregular hours, constant danger, and likelihood that your loved one will turn into this guy​ make it difficult to keep a marriage going. But not impossible. I don't know cops, but the law of probability states that somewhere in the United States, there is a cop with a good marriage. Somewhere. One of them.

Put that guy on TV. ​

I want just one show where the cop's home life is not a major source of conflict. Where difficulties arise and are dealt with like adults. Where nobody goes to bed angry. Basically, I want Tami & Coach, but they solve murders. Only one TV detective that I can think of—and I've been thinking of this for fifteen or twenty minutes!—comes close. Who may it be? Let's play a little guessing game.

He and his wife bicker, but he only rarely gets kicked out of the house. He rides his kids hard, but they respect him—even though they seem to get raped, abducted and (nearly) murdered all the time. ​He's bald, burly and angry, and he really, really doesn't like men who don't respect women. Ladies and gents, I give you Elliott Stabler:

If that's the happiest cop on TV, I think we can do a little better. ​

Dammit, Maisie Dobbs, You Let Me Down Again

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Few pieces of art stay mindblowing for long. A great TV show is only red hot for a season or two. ​A favorite band releases dud albums. Most novels sag in the middle; most great movies let us down in the end. And a play that's brilliant one night may be flabby the next. It's no surprise. Brilliance is a passing thing.

We live in an era of media glut. Hollywood may be making less movies than ever before, and the major publishing houses may be spewing out less fiction, but music, TV and small-scale theater is as fertile as a farmer's daughter in the springtime. (I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but it's an appealingly filthy image.) This means we don't have to be satisfied with anything less than brilliant entertainment. Once a piece of amusement becomes less than perfectly satisfying, we can discard it, and move on to something else, like a bored Roman emperor ordering a pair of gladiators killed so he can skip ahead to the next fight.

It's hedonistic. It's fun.​​ And there's nothing sadder than having to move on to the next thing.

There is an acute sense of disappointment tha comes when we realize that, shit, this thing I like isn't perfect any more. I've written about it before as regards television, and this weekend I encountered it again, this time in print.

I'm in a dry stretch as far as fiction goes. My preferred vice is crime fiction, and aside from the relentless pleasure that comes from reading Ed McBain, I haven't read anything truly wonderful since I picked up Larry Block's When The Sacred Ginmill Closes​ last summer. This is partly a problem of genre. A devotee of a form that lends itself to formula can hardly be surprised when he goes months or years without stumbling over something original. But I'm not looking for a reinvention of the form. All I wanted was something well-written, amusing and fresh—something that didn't have to do with serial killers.

(As an aside, is there anything less interesting than a serial killer? I can enjoy it once in a while, but in general, they're just crackpots. Crazy people do crazy shit. Where's the fun in that? Stories about serial killers aren't even really murder mysteries—they're butchery, and it makes me yawn.)​

​On vacation this weekend, a book called Maisie Dobbs​ caught my eye. A mystery starring a plucky young woman in 1920's London, whose only weapon is keen observation and an empathetic sense forged in the trenches of World War I France? Might it possibly be a real detective novel, and not a suffocating cozy mystery? The praise quote on the front—from the New York Times​, no less!—told me to "be prepared to be astonished." I decided to take the chance.

I'm coming quite late to this party. The first in a ten book (so far) series, Maisie Dobbs​ was published in 2003. Lots of people have heard of, read and loved this series—as my bookseller informed me, it's her mother in law's favorite. If Jacqueline Winspear's work had passed me by, it's just because I make a habit of avoiding mystery novels written by people with names like Jacqueline Winspear, for fear that I might be wandering into another Agatha Christie trap. 

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate cozy mysteries?​

But Maisie Dobbs​ is no cozy, and it charmed me immediately. The hero is plucky, but not insufferably so—a battle-scarred nurse who has put every shilling she has into a detective agency, and spends much of the book's first hundred pages pinching pennies. (I like my detectives realistically broke. Every PI novel starts with a complaint about how little work the snoop is getting, and yet he never has trouble paying for his car, women, or booze.) Her first investigation is peppered with hints of a traumatic past—hints that make us interested in Maisie without slowing down the action. The book is quiet, mannered and grim, and I found myself getting my hopes up. "This is brilliant," I thought, "and there are nine more in the series!" And then, around the hundred page mark, the narrative comes to a howling halt.

As if not confident that her heroine was holding our attention, Winspear decides to dive into young Maisie's origin story, leaping back to the day of her mother's death, some decades before. Maisie is taken into service by a kindly, progressive London Lady, and what follows is chapter upon chapter of wheezing Upstairs, Downstairs​ action that is as deflating as one of the more predictable storylines in Downton Abbey. ​What was fresh turns sour, and the pages of my attractive little Penguin edition, I find, begin to turn much more slowly.

It was around the third chapter in Lady Rowan's London house that I began to feel it creeping in. Disappointment had returned. I'm still going to finish Maisie Dobbs​, and if the ending is more Sherlock​ than Downton​, I'll probably pick up the sequel, in hopes that it avoids dallying around the Christie-fied manner house that I loathe so much. But the balloon is popped. This isn't going to be My New Favorite Thing. I'll have to move on to the next bit of culture.​

The Only Mystery Is Why I Kept Reading

Murder on the Orient Express, which I took out from the library last week in hopes of learning something about how to structure a mystery. (That reminds me—if anyone out there wants to produce an animal murder mystery called Death In The Monkey House, I'm really the guy you should call.)

After finding the first hundred pages delightful, the book turned into a slog, making me so angry that—in my typical breaking news style—I wrote an angry review about an 80 year-old classic. Behold!

I hate cozy mysteries. I don’t care who poisoned Lord Dalrymple, and it doesn’t matter to me how ingeniously Detective Chief Inspector St. John Woolybottom cracks the case. If a mystery contains a map of a manor house or an elaborate timeline of each suspect’s movements before and after the power went out, I will put it aside and reach for a thriller with some teeth. Chandler, Hammett, Crumley, Cain—these are the men I will take to my desert island. Dorothy L. Sayers can stay home and suck an egg.

But something has always appealed to me about Agatha Christie. I read And Then There Were None in middle school, staying up late at night and finding it made me very afraid of the dark. As tedious as clockwork mysteries are, she is regarded as the best, and The Best is always appealing. After years of ragging on manor house mysteries, I’m writing a play that parodies the form, and I’ve found that orchestrating a large cast of characters—giving everyone a motive, an alibi and a secret—is trickier than it looks. What, I wondered, might Christie have to teach me?

Read on, my pretties. Read on.

And because the article concludes with some Pink Panther talk, you'll want a little Clouseau.

Uploaded by Chris Lappas on 2009-09-11.

Off Broadway And The Five Decade Headache

I'm planning a long post for either later in the week or later today about the history of the term "off off Broadway," and the fact that it is an indisputably awful mouthful. Look forward to it—my trenchant analysis and amateurish research will both amuse and disgust you.

In the meantime, I turned up a May 5, 1957 Times article which appears to be the first time the paper used the term. At the end of a long article complaining about the woes of Off Broadway producers:

One steady observer of off Broadway drama suggested that what was needed was off-off Broadway. As a matter of fact, there is a troupe that calls itself the "Way Off Broadway Players."

Since this was the Old Gray Lady's first use of the phrase, they had yet to settle on the house style, which calls for capital Os when it's used as a noun or an adjective—"An Off Broadway producer," "Off Off Broadway is flourishing,"—but teeny-weeny Os when it's serving as an adverb—"The play was performed off Broadway." Oh, and never hyphenate it.

Anybody who doesn't own the Times Manual of Style and Usage is a chump.

More interesting than these five decade old copy-quibbles is the fact that the complaints of Off Broadway producers have not changed at all—they are still caught between artistic ambition and the nightmarish realization that, "the path to quality is paved with producers' greenbacks."

A few quick figures illustrate the situation. In 1953, a play, "Climate of Eden," was opened for $500. Today the average cost is between $7,000 and $15,000, with $20,000 no longer unusual. The revival of "Johnny Johnson," which ran for seventeen performances, cost $40,000. One of the most experienced off-Broadway producers estimated recently that of approximately 600 off-Broadway productions in the last five years, not more than twenty had made a profit.

That forty grand, internet inflation calculators will tell you, is over $300,000 today. It's been a long time since producing off Broadway was cheap.

Various scourges are blamed. The producers of the '50s criticize the rent charged by theater owners—as high as $800 a week in Eisenhower-bucks—they rage about Actors' Equity wage demands—$40 to $70 weekly—and they complain that competition among the thirty or so Off Broadway houses has forced them to raise standards and spend money in desperate hope that their show will be a hit and transfer to Broadway. "Each producer," reporter Murray Schumach tells us, "clings to the hope that his project will be another 'End as a Man,' 'The Iceman Cometh,' 'The Threepenny Opera,' 'Way of the World,' 'Uncle Vanya' or 'Purple Dust.'"

Those titles reflect one thing about the Off Broadway of old that surprised me—a heavy reliance on "the vastness of literary public domain, where prestige is high and royalties non-existent." This was a day when new plays could find a home on Broadway, and didn't need to take refuge below Fourteenth Street. What was on stage might have been old fashioned, but the front of house headaches have hardly changed at all.