by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was
episodes three and four of The Red Line,
a fascinating if sometimes exasperating eight-part mini-series (it was designed
as eight one-hour episodes but is being shown in two-hour chunks on Sunday
nights, so in order to watch it I had to miss a Lifetime “premiere” movie
called Psycho Stripper, a title
which practically writes itself) which began with the shooting of an unarmed
African-American man, Dr. Harrison Brennan (Corey Reynolds), who had the
terrible luck to shop at a convenience store just as it was being robbed by another Black man. The man at the counter was clubbed by the
robber and injured, but he was conscious long enough to see that the robber was
Black, and when Dr. Brennan approached him seeking to help him medically, the
counterman started screaming, apparently thinking the robber had come back to
finish him off. Just then police officers Paul Evans (Noel Fisher) and his
white female partner arrived on the scene and Evans shot Brennan twice in the
back without giving him any warning or instructions to turn around, put his hands
up or any of the other things cops are supposed to do with suspects before
exerting legal force. The main character in the series is actually the late Dr.
Brennan’s husband, Daniel Calder (Noah Wyle) — yes, this series incorporates
Blacks, Gays and Trans people in
its dramatis personae — who sues
the city for wrongful death and gets a $3 million settlement offer, which he
promptly blows by losing his cool in a deposition hearing in which Officer
Evans is repeating a carefully coached lie (coached by his older brother and
his dad, both former cops — apparently there as many Evanses in the Chicago
Police Department as there are Reagans in the New York one in another CBS policier,
Blue Bloods) that Dr. Brennan was wearing a
hoodie with the hood up and therefore Officer Evans had no idea he was Black.
Calder — who’s supposed to be a hero but gets drawn as such a ninny it’s hard
to maintain sympathy for him, which I suspect is intended deliberately by this
series’ writers — is also having to deal with the Black teenage girl Jira
(Alison Royale), whom Brennan and Calder adopted after her real mother, Tia
Young (Emayatzi Corinealdi), got pregnant as a teenager and gave up the baby to
Dr. Brennan so she could go on to college and get an advanced degree in economics.
Only Tia ended up returning to Chicago and “marrying down” to a bus driver,
Ethan Young (Howard Charles, who at least in these episodes looks more “Black”
than he did in the first two, where he was supposed to be a person of color but
looked as much Latino as Black); they’ve had a son, Benny (Maximus Chase
Evans). Tia has declared her candidacy for Chicago’s Board of Aldermen — their
term for a city council — against entrenched Black politician Nathan Gordon
(Glynn Turman), and she’s worried that the discovery that she had a kid and
gave her away when she was still a teenager will be exploited by Gordon to
destroy her chances. (I suspect this plot line was inspired by Barack Obama’s
primary challenge to an entrenched African-American candidate for the Illinois
state legislature early in his career in what turned out to be the only
election Obama ever lost.) Against the opposition of her remaining dad, Tia has
sought out Jira not only to get back in touch with her birth mother but because
she feels she needs a Black parent now that Harrison is gone. The Red
Line suffers from a coincidence-driven plot
line and some jarringly quick intercuts between its stories (it’s true that the
whole point of the piece is to
present the same events from multiple points of view to show how differences in
race, community and background can affect how people perceive things, but I
wish they’d hang onto one story line longer before abruptly cutting to the
next), but overall it’s a quite powerful drama.
I especially liked the scene in
which two white police officers pull over Tia while she’s walking with her
husband and their son and give her a veiled warning about what might happen to
her if she keeps attacking the police in her campaign (one difference between
her and Gordon is that Gordon wants to expand the Chicago Police Department and
Tia thinks the money would better be spent on training the existing officers to
be more sensitive to the Black community), and the crisis of conscience Paul
Evans is going through — especially after he saves a woman who’s about to be
run over by an El train (the El, short for “Elevated,” is Chicago’s trolley
system) and the police department goes overboard in sending out press releases
hailing his heroism so Calder will look like an insensitive money-grabber out
to take down a Great American Hero if he continues his lawsuit. The final shot
of episode four shows yet another of the show’s MacGuffins — a VHS tape (in
2019?) of the confrontation between Dr. Brennan and Officer Evans in the
convenience store, which got seized by Evans’ original partner to protect him
by keeping it from coming to light, then was stolen by Evans himself from his
partner’s safe, and ended up in the hands of Evans’ current partner, Diego Carranza (Sebastian Sozzi), a Puerto
Rican (we frequently hear him call home and talk to his wife in Spanish) obviously picked to partner Evans because of the optics and
the way the police department will be able to boost his image by pairing him
with a person of color. Carranza has stolen the tape, watched it, decided that
Evans was in the wrong even though both the CPD’s own internal inquiry and a
federal grand jury have cleared him, and at the end of the show we’re shown him
putting the tape in an envelope and mailing it to Daniel Calder. And if that weren’t enough plot for you, there’s also the hint
of a budding romance between Calder and an (East) Indian-American teacher who’s
his best friend at school, and is also Gay and apparently had an unrequited
crush on Calder all these years and is signaling his interest now that Calder
is single again …
