by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The TV show I was most looking forward to was the closing
episode of — no, not Game of Thrones
(which is on a premium channel I don’t get anyway) but The Red Line, the fascinating eight-part series (shown two hours a
night on the last four Sunday nights) dealing with issues of racism,
homophobia, police violence and political culture. To recap, the show is set in
Chicago and the action kicks off with the shooting of unarmed African-American
Dr. Harrison Brennan (Corey Reynolds, who’s killed early on in episode one but
reappears in a flashback sequence at the start of episode seven) by police
officer Paul Evans (Noel Fisher). The shooting occurred in a convenience store
where Dr. Brennan had stopped to buy milk for himself and his family — his
(white) husband, teacher Daniel Calder (Noah Wyle, top-billed), and their
adopted daughter Jira (Aliyah Royale). Alas, he went in just as another Black man was robbing the store and threatening the
life of the cashier, and after the robber pistol-whipped the cashier and fled,
Dr. Brennan moved towards the cashier to offer first aid and the cashier,
apparently thinking it was the same man, started screaming at him. Just then
the police arrived and Evans fired his gun into Dr. Brennan’s back without
either calling out to him to halt or put his hands up, and with the hood of Dr.
Brennan’s jacket down so he could see that Dr. Brennan was Black.
The
complications include the campaign Jira’s biological mother, Tia Young
(Emayatzi Corinealdi — isn’t that a dice poker game?), is running for the Board
of Aldermen (Chicago’s city council) from Ward 6 against Establishment Black
politician Nathan Gordon (Glynn Turman), who at the beginning of the show
offered her a job on his staff and to make her his heir apparent if she’d drop
the campaign against him. Tia is worried it will blow her campaign if it’s
revealed that she got pregnant at age 15 and gave the baby up for adoption —
and adoption by an interracial Gay couple, at that — and at the end of episode
six Alderman Gordon, looking for a way to fight back against Tia’s charge that
he pulled strings to send an innocent man to prison to protect his son from
charges of manslaughter and auto theft (the two were joy-riding when the car
they had stolen crashed and someone died), uncovers Jira and “outs” her as
Tia’s biological daughter. The last two episodes — especially the finale,
written by series creators Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss — maintained the
quiet integrity and honesty o the previous ones. Daniel Calder and daughter
Jira are pursuing a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city and are also trying
to get Officer Evans indicted for murder. The local state’s attorney (what
Illinois calls its district attorneys) convenes a grand jury and there’s some
suspense as to whether the surveillance tape, which was stolen from the
security camera outside the convenience store by Evans’ partner Vic Renna
(Elizabeth Laidlaw), then stolen from her by Evans himself, then stolen by his
new partner Diego Carranza (Sebastian Sozzi) and sent by him anonymously to
Calder after he viewed it and decided the shooting wasn’t justified, will be
admitted into evidence.
Vic Renna gets immunity for testifying before the grand
jury — and gets fired from the Chicago Police Department for her pains — while
Evans escapes indictment (the grand jury rules that he acted within acceptable
police procedures and policies — which, as I’ve observed in real-life
situations in which police have killed unarmed civilians, especially African-American ones, is precisely the problem;
I’ve also long suspected that a lot of police racism is subconscious — officers
are conditioned by police culture to believe Black people are more threatening
than whites and more likely to resort to violence, and so in those split
seconds in which they’re supposed to make that decision whether to use deadly
force, they’re habitually more likely to use force against Blacks than against
whites — and I was impressed that Parrish and Weiss wrote that into their
script) but is so traumatized by the incident that in his first day back on the
job he beats up a white guy over a dispute about a parking space. (Paul Evans,
equal-opportunity harasser and thug.) In some ways Evans is the most
interesting character in the piece: conflicted, genuinely sorry for what he
did, and also a member of a hard-core police family (the Evanses are depicted
as the “first family” of the Chicago PD the way the Reagans are of the New York
Police Department in CBS’s compelling policier Blue Bloods) whose father and older brother were both cops
(though dad retired and the brother ended up in a wheelchair due to a wound
sustained while on duty) that have largely whelped a moral monster.
When the
department makes Officer Rinna — who in the meantime has drifted into a brief
sexual affair with Evans’ disabled brother (he’s in a wheelchair but, like a
number of males I’ve done home care for, it hasn’t affected his ability to have
sex) — the scapegoat, Rinna defends her decision to accept immunity and testify
against Paul Evans by telling him and his brother that she has two sons and she
didn’t want to risk going to prison and having their dad raise her kids because
“then they’d turn out just like you.”
The finale occurs at the election night party at Tia Young’s headquarters,
where [spoiler alert!] Tia
squeaks out a narrow victory in her election campaign, thanks to a donation of
$100,000 she got from Daniel Calder’s settlement money from the city (plot
hole: it would never have been paid out that fast), and Nathan Gordon’s parting shot is that, by
using the $100,000 to bribe a young Black woman on his staff into passing her
derogatory information about him, Tia has shown herself just as corrupt as he
is. (I was expecting a plot line in which the whole thing was a set-up — Nathan
Gordon had his staff member offer dirt on him for a price, with the intent that
the supposedly high-minded Tia Young was willing to bribe one of his staff
members — but Parrish and Weiss perhaps wisely didn’t go there.)
At the big
party Jira appears and invites Liam Bhatt (Vinny Chhibber), an (East) Indian
Gay Muslim who’s a fellow teacher of Calder’s at Jane Byrne High School and
who’s had a crush on him for years but was honorable enough not to act on it
while Calder’s husband was still alive — and the two of them lock lips in a
deserted corner of the room, adding yet another fascinating issue to the
already potent mix on this show: how soon should one grieve for a late partner
before dating again? (This proved to be unexpectedly powerful for me
personally; it brought back memories of my four years with John Gabrish and the
sadness with which I greeted his loss before I finally got over it. What
particularly broke my heart was that John G. always talked about wanting us to
stay together long enough that we’d build up a “history,” a long line of shared
experiences — and I’ve done that, alas not with John but with my husband
Charles, whom I got together with five years after John G. died even though
we’d known each other briefly over a decade earlier.) Though there were a
number of directions the writers could have gone to resolve their multiple
intersecting plot lines, the ones they chose were dramatically honest and
moving, ably capping the show.
They also introduced other issues, including the
dramatic reappearance of Jira’s birth father into her life — he’s an electrical worker who turned
his life around after he moved from Chicago to Indiana after he walked out on
Tia and her unborn child and became a born-again Christian. He shows up at one
of Tia’s campaign rallies and later meets with Jira and tells her he wants to
be part of her life — and Jira seems willing until he makes a passing remark to
the effect that he considers homosexuality to be morally wrong and that Dr.
Brennan is in hell for it. Jira naturally throws out this creep who has
denounced her real parents — the
ones who were there for her and raised her — as sinners destined for eternal
damnation. “God made the rules, I didn’t,” he says, thereby choosing his faith
over his family and blowing whatever chance he had to get back into Jira’s
life. (Had it been me, I probably would have told him off: “You were just my
mom’s sperm donor! Harrison Brennan was my real father!”) There’s also an interesting plot line at
the end in which Calder uses part of the city’s settlement money to buy his way
onto the board of Chicago Equality, the city’s major (and most Establishment)
Queer political organization, and announces that he’s going to use his
influence to make the organization more assertive and confrontational.
The
Red Line has some flaws — notably some of
the whiplash-inducing cutbacks from one story to another (at times we had to
wait until we could identify which set of actors were involved to tell which plot line we were watching at any given moment) —
but overall it’s a strong work of extended story-telling, exploiting the
advantage of TV over film in that you can tell a full story without having to
shoehorn it into the two- to three-hour running time needed to accommodate the
schedules of movie theatres. (Erich von Stroheim, you should be alive now and
making mini-series!) It also makes a lot of strong political points but mostly
does that in a refreshingly non-didactic way, and the fact that you feel as strongly about the internal
moral conflict of Officer Paul Evans (who’s carefully drawn neither as the bad guy Black Lives Matter and other
progressive activists would be painting him as in a similar real-life situation
or the good guy the police and their community supporters would portray) as you
do about Daniel Calder’s grief, Tia Young’s assertive challenge to the Chicago
political establishment and the other plot threads of this series is a
testament to the skill of its creators (including Ava DuVernay, the remarkable
director of Selma — she’s listed
as an executive producer and just what, if anything, she contributed creatively
is not clear, but the show has the same kind of quiet, unsentimental dignity
and subtlety in depicting political struggles as her great film) in creating a
rich, multi-layered dramatic texture that comments on current events without
degenerating into propaganda for either side in America’s ongoing political and
cultural wars.
