The CBS crime procedural is a gimme for an audience who’d die to have this therapeutic queen dismantle racial capitalism in one fell girl-boss swoop.
“Who do you go to if you can’t go to the cops?” Jewel Machado, a high-achieving Latinx teen-ager, wonders, unbelievably, in the pilot of the CBS action procedural “The Equalizer.” Even considering the relative conservatism of prime-time drama, the line struck me as glaringly unhip. Wouldn’t this character, coded as she is, get it? And yet the series is full of Jewel Machados: people who are marginalized but still stunningly naïve about the forces of marginalization. Their cluelessness allows “The Equalizer” to showcase the bad-bitch proficiency of its hero, Robyn McCall, played by the congenitally warm Queen Latifah. In each episode, an unequal system plunges a character, who is poor or Black or both, to the darkest of depths, and McCall, a former C.I.A. agent, is invariably there to rescue them. Though she is styled a lot like Olivia Benson of “Law and Order: S.V.U.,” in domme leather outfits, often astride a motorcycle, McCall is a soothing, maternal figure. The show is a gimme for an audience who’d die to have this therapeutic queen dismantle racial capitalism in one fell girl-boss swoop.
The series, a reboot of an eighties crime drama of the same name, premièred right after Super Bowl LV. I found this scheduling inspired: perhaps it moved the viewer to build a through line from the National Football League’s foul embrace of the language of the social-justice movement to the more soulful appropriation of the movement’s convictions in the series that followed. From the “Black Trans Lives Matter” poster on the wall of a community-activist character to the scene of a youth choir singing the anthem “Glory,” from Ava DuVernay’s film “Selma,” “The Equalizer” signals that it has the right politics, a nonnegotiable in post-Trump début television.
In her past life, McCall did the dirtier bidding of the C.I.A. “You work with orphans in Third World countries, so I can’t ever be unhappy,” her daughter complains; what is strongly implied is that McCall did the opposite of help those children. Haunted by her misdeeds, she has left the agency and returned to New York City, where she enacts her penance: the extrajudicial exoneration of framed individuals in the tri-state area. With the help of two sidekicks—Mel (Liza Lapira), an ex-Air Force sharpshooter, and Harry (Adam Goldberg), an I.T. whiz—and her smirking mentor, William Bishop (the always debonair Chris Noth), McCall takes down gentrification profiteers and their hired guns, warmongers and tech magnates, entitled white male murderers and the judges who protect them.
“Now it’s my world,” she says, after she’s beaten a gaggle of mobsters into a Looney Tunes heap. This line, breaking the fourth wall, signals that “The Equalizer” is at ease with its kitsch. Queen Latifah is an executive producer of the series, which was written by Andrew Marlowe and Terri Edda Miller, of “Castle,” and her star power and feminist rap persona instantly, and perhaps problematically, lighten the intended darkness of the show’s conceit. In the original series, McCall was Robert, and he was white, and he tended to lean against his hot car, in the shadows. Denzel Washington played an unsmiling “Equalizer” in Antoine Fuqua’s movie adaptations; there, the redressing of justice was always a spectacle of brutality, a heavy shout-out, no doubt, to Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”
In the new version, there are interesting allusions to Harriet Tubman: McCall conducts her operations from underground, and she has mostly given up a social life in order to lead others to freedom. The show keeps telling us, especially in the scenes between McCall and her aunt Vi (the underused Lorraine Toussaint), that our hero is guarding an ugly psychological wound—the kind of thing that could eventually cause her to snap. Five episodes in, however, Queen Latifah, with her unfailingly glamorous posture, has yet to convey her history, which might give her character some much-needed depth. One is never worried that McCall will take her vengeance too far.
Critics and showrunners alike say that the police procedural, the most American genre, is in crisis. Last summer’s police violence against Black Americans forced what have been called “reckonings,” or, more to the point, recalibrations of who and what perspectives popular entertainment should cater to. “The Equalizer” may not be a police-glorification device, but don’t mistake McCall for a renegade; she delivers a compensatory fantasy of law and order. In the second episode, a Black mother, whose son has been taken hostage by international criminals, shakily points a gun at McCall, exhausted by the situation. McCall does not flinch; she believes in the goodness of the people she’s trying to help. And they are always, unilaterally, good. The Black men who are killed, often reformed criminals, are presented as angels—almost ritualistic sacrifices. It’s preppy blaxploitation.
That’s not to say that I don’t dig watching McCall obliterate Trumps n’ Musks. I like the show best when it abandons righteousness and goes for camp, as when McCall pretends to be a chauffeur in order to duplicate her passenger’s cell phone. One episode is a feast of racial-justice cheese: McCall uncovers a housing scandal in part by deciphering a lyric from Kendrick Lamar’s “m.A.A.d city.” I’ll keep watching, mostly because of the burgeoning romance between Robyn and a reluctant conspirator, the goody-two-shoes Black cop Dante (Tory Kittles), which promises a knotty, Rhimesian story line. The two flirt at the gym—we see some lower torso—and Queen Latifah shifts to the rom-com gear that she can so easily inhabit.
The ampersand in the title of the Netflix show “Ginny & Georgia” means to imply conjunction but turns out to indicate a grotesquely cute chimera. The body of the series is a bantery young-adult soap, the head a woman-on-the-edge thriller, and the tail a race melodrama. The creator, Sarah Lampert, must have looked upon her handiwork with proud amusement. The show’s action is driven by its titular duo: Brianne Howey as Georgia, a young sexpot mother of white-working-class provenance, and her fifteen-year-old biracial daughter, Ginny (Antonia Gentry), who, when the show opens, is drowning in angst. “Is this Hell? It feels like Hell,” she chides her mom, when Georgia sticks her nose in Ginny’s teen business. The same can be said of watching this show.
Let’s get the references out of the way. Like “The Equalizer,” the series lightly imitates and then parodies a network-TV ancestor, which, in this case, is “Gilmore Girls.” (There’s an admirable Stars Hollow dis in the pilot.) Following the mysterious death of Georgia’s husband, who was also the stepfather of Ginny and her younger brother, Austin, Georgia drives the family to the fictional town of Westbury, Massachusetts, for a fresh start. With her Fashion Nova wardrobe and her overdone Southern idioms, Georgia seems to push the entire town out of its New England repression. A nurturer intent on securing for her children the security that she never had herself, she also outwits prying school moms and outruns a secret that would ruin the family’s fragile peace. Ginny, caught between wanting to assimilate and wanting to raze the neighborhood, can’t rest, sensing that, somewhere, there’s blood in the water. “No secrets, right?” mother coos to daughter. Maybe just a few.
A twitchy mystery is tacked on to the shallow character studies, a device through which “G. & G.” can launder sermons on self-loathing and self-love, family ties and social alienation. We are teased with a race catharsis between mother and child that never comes to fruition. Spying on the exploits of her daughter, Georgia sets up a private Instagram account, named after her idol, Vivien Leigh. “My regards to Vivien Leigh,” snorts Ginny, informing Mom that “Scarlett O’Hara’s been cancelled.” The clash of traditional-Americana references and hyper-modern lingo makes you want to groan, right? But circulating on Twitter, as I write, is a scene that made me wonder if “Ginny & Georgia” is not cannier than it seems. Ginny taunts her half-Taiwanese, half-white boyfriend for not knowing Mandarin, and he counters with this bitchy retort: “Sorry I’m not Chinese enough for you, but I’ve never seen you pound back jerk chicken.” They are spiritedly engaging in the so-called Oppression Olympics. It’s demeaning, to be served this ham. But is it that off? No amount of recoiling changes the fact that “Ginny & Georgia” is mirroring a mode of cavalier speech on social media that compresses the ineffability of identity into a checklist of outwardly visible bona fides: what one eats, where one was raised, how well one twerks. If “Ginny & Georgia” can sound canned, then so do we. ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment