by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. I watched episodes five and six of The Red Line, a fascinating eight-part mini-series on CBS that
manages to explore some of the hottest hot-button issues of our time. A Black
Gay male professional, Dr. Harrison Brennan (Corey Reynolds), is shot in a
convenience store where he’d stopped by on his way home to get milk. The
shooter is police officer Paul Evans (Noel Fisher, who actually gives the best
performance in the show — wracked by conscience and, as we learned in last
night’s episode, screwed up royally by a domineering father whom he’s having an
argument with that’s about to degenerate into fisticuffs when dad has a stroke
and Paul callously lets him expire on the floor of the apartment he shares with
dad and his older brother, both of whom were also cops, in what’s yet another
cop of the chilling scene from The Little Foxes in which the villainess essentially kills her
husband by denying him his heart medication until he expires), and at the end
of last week’s episode Paul’s police partner steals the videotape of the camera
footage of Evans’ shooting Dr. Brennan and mails it to Brennan’s surviving
husband, Daniel Calder (Noah Wyle). The central characters of this show are
Calder, Evans and Tia Young (Emayatzy Corinealdi — a major screen presence
despite her indigestible name), a Black woman who’s running for the Board of
Aldermen (what they call the city council in Chicago, where this story takes
place) against entrenched incumbent Nathan Gordon (Glynn Turman, who in both
looks and stuffy self-righteousness would be good casting for a biopic of
Clarence Thomas) who’s been admitted to the white establishment of Chicago even
though he’s Black.
The tie between Calder and Tia is that years before, as a
teenager, Tia had a child from a casual sexual relationship and, unready for
the demands and responsibilities of motherhood but also unwilling to have an
abortion, she turned the kid over for adoption to Dr. Brennan — and Dr.
Brennan’s white partner eventually did a co-parent adoption, so he’s now the legal
guardian of the child, Jira Calder-Brennan (Aliyah Royale — were her parents
fans of the late R&B singer?), who’s turned into a heavy-set and quite
feisty young Black woman who’s re-established contact with her birth mom
despite her surviving adoptive father’s attempts to keep them apart — and also
the concerns of Tia and her sister, who’s also her campaign manager, that the
revelation that she had an illegitimate child whom she put up for adoption and
who ended up with an interracial Gay male couple will kill her nascent
political career. It’s a testament to how powerful this show is that our friend
Garry, who usually is bored by serious TV drama, has been riveted by this
series the last two weeks. These shows include some traumatizing revelations for
the characters, including the surfacing of the police video of the Brennan
shooting online (Jira secretly copied it onto her cell phone while her dad was
watching it and posted it to social media); Daniel’s discovery (via a strip of
four photos taken at one of those arcade booths, which he finds in an old book
of his late husband’s) that Brennan had a brief affair with a bartender named
Scott; the interest of Daniel’s fellow teacher Liam Bhatt (Vinny Chhibber), a
Muslim from India and thereby on a lot of bigots’ shit lists (Muslim! Brown! Queer!) who’s also Gay and long
had an unrequited crush on Daniel — he and Daniel end up having sex together
but then break it off after Liam realizes Daniel isn’t really in love with him
but tricked with him only as a weird get-back for Harrison having cheated on
Daniel way back when; and a climax in which Jira announces a student protest
and school walk-out to demand that Paul Evans be prosecuted for murder for
shooting Dr. Brennan.
The episode’s climax occurs when the protest occurs,
despite the threats by the school authorities to punish anyone, student or teacher, who participates, only the
march is confronted by a group of off-duty cops — and though he’s never laid
eyes on him before, Daniel recognizes one of the cops as the man who had
previously called a death threat on Jira which he had received by phone. The
event erupts in violence and Liam Bhatt is arrested; Daniel waits all night at
the police station for him to be released, but when he finally does get out Liam
cold-shoulders him, and at the end of the episode Tia gets a late-night knock
on her door from a gaggle of reporters. She thinks they’re there to ask her
about Nathan Gordon’s son Cory, who drove a stolen car and was arrested but was
able to shift the blame onto his passenger, who drew a four-year prison
sentence while Cory went scot-free due to the strings his powerful dad was able
to pull with the Illinois state’s attorney — but they’re actually there to ask
about Gordon’s hit-back. It seems that his opposition researchers have learned
that Jira is Tia’s illegitimate daughter and leaked that to the media. The show
started out strong and has got even better as the various plot lines have
converged — and the quality is really a surprise given that the producer, Greg
Berlanti, is usually in charge of Warner Bros.’ superhero shows on TV and
hadn’t shown much indication that he could do something this dramatically
complex and politically aware (though maybe he had in the anti-Trump plot elements and asides he was
able to shove into some of the Supergirl episodes he’s produced). I can hardly wait to see the ending next
week!
