“I don’t think of it as a procedural. I think of it as a character study—a study of many characters, really.”
—STEVEN ZAILLIAN WRITER/ADAPTER/SHOWRUNNER/DIRECTOR THE NIGHT OF
“[The lawyers] see each other all the time. They’re not enemies. They’re in the same business, just like cops and bad guys…. They’re going to say, ‘Hey, how you doing? How’s the wife?’ That’s life. That’s real life.
Everything is gray and if you don’t respect the gray, what you have is writing with crayons.”
—RICHARD PRICE WRITER/ADAPTER/SHOWRUNNER THE NIGHT OF
Chapter 2
The Slow-Burn, Season-Long Procedural
From Murder One and Twin Peaks to The Night Of, Fargo, Search Party and More
For decades, the most common TV series characters have been doctors, lawyers and cops, especially detectives. The formula is easy to digest: case of the week followed by positive resolution. In the world of the classic procedural, there isn’t a disease, legal case or crime that can’t be cured/adjudicated/solved within 42 minutes.1 Many of these formulaic series still exist today because audiences still crave the familiar and reassuring. Like the multi-camera sitcom, it’s comfort food. Law & Order is TV’s most durable franchise for a reason, with its descendants (CSI, NCIS, Criminal Minds) and their legal/medical counterparts now global, multi-billion dollar franchises. The cases are often provocative and/or ripped from the headlines, but the examination of the crimes (or lawsuits or medical ailments) is, by design and dint of constraint, mostly on the surface and easily resolved.
Today, unless writer/creators are doing something fresh and surprising, it can be hard to break through all the noise. The slow-burn, season-long procedural has emerged as one solution to this problem. But let’s go back and set its predecessor, the classic procedural, in context. In every era, major technological shifts are accompanied by varying degrees of anxiety, skepticism and fear. The advent of the clunky RCA television set, more than 70 years ago, was no exception. If the radio seemed non-threatening, television felt like an intrusion: Who are these strangers in the mysterious light box invading our living rooms? For many, it was an exciting innovation, tantamount to the cell phone and the Internet. Back then, there had never been a more disruptive technology than the “idiot box” or “boob tube”—and nothing would ever be the same again.
It’s human nature to fear change. When we segued from radio to television, the TV networks of the day were inclined to offer up programs that were safe, palatable and reassuring. Sitcoms featured “Happy people seeking happy solutions to happy problems,”2 and dramas encompassed heroes and villains—and the good guys always prevailed. TV sets were in black and white, and so were the storylines. Network mandates in the 1950s and ’60s were designed to present shows that were inviting to both audiences and advertisers. Commercials featured soap, floor wax, laundry detergent, coffee and cigarettes. (Of course, this was long before the Surgeon General’s warning burst our collective bubble.)
Back then, few wanted controversy and ambiguity on television. We wanted resolution and easy answers. I’m oversimplifying to make a point, but post-World War II, the perception was that America was still a united nation, and TV reflected the aspirations, hopes and dreams of the majority. (Today, we’d tag that White Male Privilege.) Madison Avenue was selling, not only products with names such as Joy, Cheer and Mr. Clean, but a way of life. We generally trusted our news sources, the three major broadcast networks, and anchormen such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, to deliver the same version of the news.
In his controversial book Primetime Propaganda, Ben Shapiro makes a case for how “television has been used over the past 60 years by Hollywood writers, producers, actors, and executives to promote their liberal ideals, to push the envelope on social and political issues, and to shape America in their own leftist image.”3 Regardless of Shapiro’s conservative standpoint, the advent of television as technological advancement—which was, in itself, neutral—did come with some kind of subliminal political and social agenda. Do characters and storylines on TV series now represent and reflect the lives of all citizens, or are they still just whitewashed versions of Americans as filtered primarily through a white male lens?
In the early decades of television, this wasn’t a question any of the power brokers in the TV business wanted to answer. Early TV sets were a luxury the poor and disenfranchised couldn’t afford, any more than the products being advertised on the commercial breaks. The struggling underclass, including immigrants, was mostly invisible—when they weren’t being stereotyped and stigmatized as perps, thugs, whores and “the help.” The white majority’s collective need for comfort and reassurance gave rise to the predictable happy ending. Sweet justice was always meted out on a crime series. We always knew 100% who the perp was because the suspected criminal would always confess in the end, express contrition and explain his motives to the cops or superheroes, before being hauled off in cuffs. Resolution and predictability were touchstones of TV series for the last five decades (with the shows of Norman Lear, Tom Fontana and Steven Bochco as notable exceptions; granted, all are white male showrunner/creators, but their stories are hyperconscious of real-world issues).
With the digital television revolution, audiences have transcended the formulaic and predictable in favor of exploring the nuanced gray areas of complex, heavily flawed heroes, antiheroes and antagonists in series that defy stereotypes or easy resolution. They lean into the chaotic, often irrational world in which we live now. Today’s trailblazing content creators are delivering series grounded in gritty realism, uncomfortable, intentionally cringe-worthy humor and irony. Some are perhaps even too clever for their own good. But most challenge our expectations for an established genre by pushing the envelope and provoking us to question the status quo.
The season-long procedural has sprouted into the dominant genre of the digital era, which favors serialization and authenticity above all.
The truth is out there, but it’s a slippery and subjective slope. There’s a reason The People v. O.J. Simpson so captivated the zeitgeist; it was as if we didn’t know the outcome of the double murder trial. Now that we have the capacity to videotape everything at our fingertips (along with dashboard, traffic and satellite surveillance cameras), we’re convinced that someone somewhere knows something more: If the truth comes too easily, it must be a conspiracy. The X-Files has been supplanted by Mr. Robot and The Man in the High Castle (the latter created by X-Files alum Frank Spotnitz). Paranoia plays a key role in the popularity of such shows.
In the past, if we figured out the solution to the mystery and were correct all along, we gave ourselves a pat on the back for being smart. Today, we’re more likely to tune out. The way we live now is interactive. A predictable storyline is at best disappointingly derivative; at worst, an insult to our intelligence. One thing is certain in today’s on-demand TV landscape: Audiences need choices. Conversely, once we get swept up in an irresistible story, like a great page-turning novel, we don’t want it to end. Viewers crave twists and turns. We embrace flashbacks that help clarify and justify unfortunate life choices for their heroes and heroines. Cracking the case, the code, the medical condition, even redemption are all still possible—if they’re credibly and proactively earned. Audiences enjoy a dash of magic realism and/or mysticism but reject deus ex machina, helpful coincidence and easy remedies. Memorable TV characters work hard and play hard and are often experts with a liability. The heroic ones endeavor to save lives but tend to possess a self-destructive streak.
In my last book, TV Outside the Box: Trailblazing in the Digital Television Revolution, I analyzed the difference between the new existential detective story and older, more traditional whodunits. True Detective on HBO (Season 1, 2013) isn’t the usual detective story; it’s existential, the conventional genre with a twist, contemplating, “Who are we?” Writer/creator/showrunner Nic Pizzolatto learned two valuable lessons: one before the first season began and one after. Pizzolatto got his career start on the AMC one-hour crime drama The Killing, which investigated the tragic death of a teenaged girl, Rosie Larsen. When series adapter (from the Danish format, Forbrydelsen) and showrunner Veena Sud chose not to reveal Rosie’s killer by the end of Season 1, Sud’s slow-burn approach proved taxing for its audience. In fact, there was so much viewer backlash that AMC almost pulled the plug on the series. Lesson learned: Reveal whodunit by the end of the first season. Pizzolatto also learned the pain of following up the phenomenal success of Season 1 of True Detective with a second that fell short of its first. Lesson learned: Breaking up is hard to do, with actors such as Season 1’s Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson playing one-of-a-kind, iconic characters. It’s hard to follow outstanding originality with more outstanding originality, but maybe time is the key. After a longer break between seasons, we look forward to Pizzolatto’s third installment. Season 3 has been green-lit by HBO with Mahershala Ali to star and Jeremy Saulnier to direct. It will be set in the Ozarks, following a gruesome crime and mystery over three different time periods.
Fargo on FX dodged the sophomore jinx with a transcendent second season set in the 1970s. Fargo adapter/showrunner Noah Hawley subverted our expectations by adding disco, women’s lib, EST self-help programs and UFOs—and we ate it up, like waffles at the now infamous Waffle Hut.
The Season-Long Mystery
Now that we’ve collectively embraced the medical procedural with a twist: House, Royal Pains, Grey’s Anatomy; the legal procedural with a twist: The Good Wife, Suits, The Good Fight; and the crime-procedural with a twist: Monk, Hannibal, The Mentalist, Elementary, the CSI franchise (a how-dunit, not a whodunit), and Person of Interest (precognition), we’re eschewing the formulaic case-of-the-week structure for the season-long mystery.
It helps now that the seasons are shorter, as the Brits have proven time and time again with such high-quality series as Happy Valley, Broadchurch and Prime Suspect. FX gave us the season-long legal procedural in the one-hour drama series, Damages, created by Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zelman. The legal thriller explores a high-stakes civil lawsuit from multiple perspectives and timelines, the sweet spot of the show being the cunning, ruthless machinations of founding senior partner Patty Hewes (Glenn Close).
Damages serves up one juicy case per each 13-episode season, part open and part closed mystery whodunit and how-dunit, with rookie law associate Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) as an innocent babe in the woods being prepped for slaughter—unless she’s able to turn the tables on Hewes. The show’s premise and demographics weren’t the best fit for the (at the time) male-skewing FX network, but the critically acclaimed series is taut and suspenseful, with unexpected twists and turns, and flash-forwards to foreshadow the mystery’s ultimate payoff.4
It’s significantly harder to sustain a season-long procedural over 22+ episodes, as trailblazing showrunner Steven Bochco discovered when he created two series that, in hindsight, were ahead of their time. Murder One, which premiered on ABC in 1995, stars Daniel Benzali as criminal litigator Ted Hoffman, a fervent defender of his clients. The first season revolves around a single high-profile criminal case: the murder of teenaged Jessica Costello, with Hoffman representing a young Hollywood star played by Jason Gedrick. During the first part of the season, Hoffman’s associates also handle smaller, “closed-ended” episodic cases. But the entire season consists of one defense case for Hoffman & Associates.
While groundbreaking in its format (one case, one season), the show struggled to retain viewers. The low ratings were a symptom of audiences not having the ability to catch up on missed episodes—unless they’d remembered to program their VCRs in advance. Lost (2004–2010) had similar issues, but the J.J. Abrams/Damon Lindelof series became a must-see phenomenon anyway—although some grew weary of its esoteric storytelling. Flashbacks were welcomed, but flash-forwards and flash-sideways tested the willing suspension of disbelief, and some viewers found themselves lost in the complex plotting of the latter seasons.
With Murder One’s slow-burn procedural format flaming out, Daniel Benzali was replaced in the revamped Season 2 by Anthony LaPaglia, who portrays Jimmy Wyler, a former assistant DA who took over Hoffman’s firm, and features not 1 but 3 unrelated trials, over 18 episodes. But it was too late to turn the tide; the second season of the show was even less successful. ABC canceled Murder One at the end of the 1996–1997 season. LaPaglia went on to star in the successful missing person, case-of-the-week series Without a Trace for CBS.
Undeterred and no stranger to experimentation5 and controversy (Bochco’s long-running series Hill Street Blues and NYPD were notorious for their edgy dialogue and envelope-pushing nude scenes), he tried again with the one-hour detective anthology series Murder in the First for TNT in 2014. The series, co-created by Eric Lodal, followed a single case for each full season (Seasons 1 and 3 contained 10 episodes; Season 2 had 12). Despite critical acclaim and a small but loyal audience, TNT pulled the plug on the heavily serialized show after 32 episodes in 2016.
There was a time when “serialization” was a bad word and undesired format at the TV networks, with creators encouraged to avoid “premise pilots” (square one, expositional) and serialized arcs. Of course, a number of nighttime soaps managed to hook viewers early on and retain them (Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing, Melrose Place), but these escapist shows are slow-moving relationship dramas, featuring archvillains we loved to hate, and steeped in gossip, backstabbing and scandals; they aren’t case-of-the-week procedurals. They are sexy, escapist love triangles on steroids, as easy to pick up and put down as a paperback beach read. Nighttime dramas (primetime soaps) were/are more about eye candy and outlandish catfights than a serious representation of the criminal, judicial and medical system; in the nighttime soap genre, realism takes a back seat to juicy, dramatic revelations. Cliffhangers—hinging on convoluted backstories, scandalous secrets and lies, amnesia, long-lost identical twin siblings and torrid forbidden love stories—rule the day.
In today’s TV landscape, we like our procedural series grounded in reality. We want to see plaintiffs and defendants put under a microscope, not just in the courthouse, but at home, in their personal lives. CBS’ The Good Wife was originally conceived as a legal case-of-the-week procedural. But viewers on the message boards were more interested in Alicia Florrick’s (Julianna Margulies) personal life than her legal cases. Ditto for the other associates. Consequently, showrunners Robert and Michelle King put the emphasis on their love lives and familial challenges, and most of the cases were settled out of court.
The Good Wife became a hybrid serialized procedural, with season-long, personal character arcs and legal cases of the week. Similarly, ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder (created by showrunner Peter Norwalk and executive produced by Shonda Rhimes, who later moved to Netflix) offers at least one season-long murder-mystery plotline, along with murder cases of the week for Philadelphia law professor Annalise Keating (Viola Davis) and her ambitious criminal law students to solve. Other “hybrid” shows include The Mentalist and The Good Fight (which I discuss later in this chapter).
As viewers of law-and-order series know, to have a crime, an investigation and a verdict within 42 minutes is incredible, bordering on ridiculous. What streaming on-demand TV has ushered in is a slew of season-long procedurals that defy a cookie cutter format and shake things up. The lines between corrupt and righteous are blurred. The crimes are more complex, with the once black-and-white “just the facts, ma’am”6 approach popularized by Dragnet (1951–1959) and Adam 12 (1968–1975), now analyzed and influenced by issues of corruption, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, mental illness, cronyism and all manner of morally ambiguous, nuanced mitigating factors. If it’s tougher to separate real news from so-called fake news today, devoted viewers of the season-long procedural drama want to know everything and draw their own conclusions.
When it comes to ambiguity, intrigue, audacity and a groundbreaking season-long procedural, the impact of the original Twin Peaks (created by Mark Frost and David Lynch and launched in 1990 on ABC) cannot be overstated. Series from Lost and The Leftovers to current shows such as Stranger Things and The OA owe a great debt to Twin Peaks and its central mystery laced with dark, offbeat humor; heightened melodrama, horror and surrealism; and a cinematic style and tone that don’t resemble any prior TV series. It remains a disruptive, edgy, disturbing show—a far cry from reassuring and safe. Back in 1990, traditional viewers didn’t understand the genre: Was it a satire, a parody or supposed to be taken seriously? Agent Dale Cooper’s (Kyle MacLachlan) investigation into the murder of high school homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) defied the homogenous broadcast network formula, and genre classification. It made audiences uncomfortable. In a word, it was weird. With its haunting score (composed by Angelo Badalamenti in collaboration with Lynch), the series was a short-lived anomaly lasting barely two seasons: Controversial and polarizing, it has now achieved certified cult status. It was Northern Exposure7 on acid.
The Showtime reboot proves that Twin Peaks is a series whose time has come … again. The new limited event series is again created by Mark Frost and David Lynch, this time with Lynch directing all 18 episodes. 2017’s Twin Peaks averaged 2 million viewers per week, matching Showtime’s other successes. Its two-hour pilot had the highest number of streaming viewers ever for an “original” series premiere on Showtime.8 It’s distinct from its predecessors—a different blend of genres and not a straightforward sequel. Twin Peaks: The Return is its own beast, with its own twists, internal logic and surrealism. Perhaps it’s also reflective of our world that has changed in the past 25 years; it’s bigger now, and so is the scale of its mystery and horror. Twin Peaks’ latest iteration remains an extraordinary piece of visual art—consistently surprising and neither film or TV. Before David Lynch was a director, he was a painter.9
Consistently brilliant during its run and standing the test of time almost 10 years since the series finale, HBO’s The Wire utilized the season-long procedural and season-to-season pivot to perfection; this landmark series will continue to be the benchmark to meet or better, for generations to come. For more on The Wire’s trailblazing approach, visit www.routledge.com/cw/landau.
We now live in a TV ecosystem based on delayed gratification and this delicious paradox:
“I can’t wait to find out what happens next, but don’t tell me!”
Below is a collection of trailblazing, season-long procedurals that disrupt and/or go beyond the once tried-and-true formula of case of the week, by painting detailed portraits of the characters themselves and their wounds/backstories. For the record, an “open mystery” is where the audience knows who the perpetrator is from the beginning. A “closed mystery” is a whodunit where the perp is not revealed until the end. All great stories pose central questions about the future (i.e., the what’s going to happen next) and establish central mysteries about the past (i.e., what happened to each main character) sometimes via flashbacks, sometimes woven into the present action. This forward/backward, push/pull tug-of-war deepens our characters, fuels story engines, stokes the dramatic fires and sets the course of each series’ narrative drive (i.e., sense of urgency). Despite the variety of serialized, slow-burn procedurals explored below, notice how the destination in each subgenre is always the same: to arrive at the Truth. Sometimes we get the answer; other times we’re left with ambiguity. Sometimes the truth will set you free; sometimes it’s obscured by antagonistic forces and/or our flawed justice system—with tragic results.
The Mystery Underlying the Crime:
The Night Of
THE CRIME: A young heiress named Andrea (Sofia Black-D’Elia) is stabbed to death in her Manhattan brownstone. Naz (Riz Ahmed), the unlucky man who picks her up in his father’s cab the night of her death, wakes up in the house the next morning to find her body. He is arrested but insists on his innocence.
THE INVESTIGATORS: Detective Dennis Box (Bill Camp); Defense Attorney John Stone (John Turturro); Lead Defense Attorney Chandra Kapoor (Amara Karan); District Attorney Helen Weiss (Jeannie Berlin).
THE SUSPECTS: Naz; Andrea’s stepfather, Don Taylor (Paul Sparks); two punks who make racially charged comments to Naz the night of the murder; an investment counselor, Ray Halle (Paulo Costanzo).
OPEN or CLOSED MYSTERY: Closed. The audience is as much in the dark as the characters themselves.
HOW THE TRUTH COMES TO LIGHT: Detective Box, the arresting officer, gradually comes to believe Naz may be innocent. He pursues several suspects and helps Stone with information.
WHODUNIT: Our lips are sealed.
HBO’s acclaimed mini-series The Night Of is based on the award-winning British television series Criminal Justice (2008–2009) and co-written by novelist and screenwriter Richard Price (The Color of Money, The Wire) and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Gangs of New York).10 The writers create empathy for Naz by showing how he loses his innocence at Rikers Island. Practically a virgin when he has sex with young heiress Andrea, he quickly turns to smoking crack in jail just to deal with his grief. The other lead character, Stone, is a divorced, middle-aged attorney who suffers from a horrific case of eczema that causes him to have to walk the streets of New York in sandals. His son is so embarrassed by his dad’s condition that he hardly wants to be seen with him. Not many care about Stone any more, but Stone cares about Naz. He doesn’t see any way of getting him off—the circumstantial evidence is too great—and begs him to cop a plea, initially hoping to make a quick $25,000 off this case. Standing by his innocence, Naz refuses.
The central mystery is, of course, who killed Andrea? As Naz’s drug-addled brain has no recollection of that night, he remains a suspect for the audience. The central question of this provocative, timely series is: Can a Muslim man get a fair trial in the US judicial system? Did the police profile him, and will the jury be prejudiced against him, presuming that he’s a radical? Although Naz comes across in the first episode as shy and innocent, as the story unfolds, we learn that he does not have a perfect past. Writers Price and Zaillian also present several alternative prospects for who the killer is.
When Naz’s lawyer’s feelings cause her to make an illegal maneuver during the course of the trial, the judge removes her as lead attorney and tells Stone that he will now deliver the closing arguments. Stone, whose clients normally consist of prostitutes and petty thieves, has never come close to delivering a closing argument in a first-degree murder trial. He freaks, and his eczema comes back that night with a vengeance. The next day Stone comes to the courtroom looking like a corpse with a nasty sunburn. But with heroic determination, he gives a powerhouse speech to the jury.
The italics above are mine. The suspense that Price and Zaillian create while making us wait for the jury’s verdict is almost unbearable. In addition, the writers create an even greater sense of mystery about what will happen to each of the side characters we’re invested in—Stone, Box, Kapoor, Weiss—and even Stone’s adopted cat.
In his portrayal of Naz, Riz Ahmed made history as first man of South Asian descent and the first Muslim to win an Emmy for acting.11 “It is always strange reaping the rewards of a story based on real world suffering,” Ahmed said in his speech. “But if this show has shone a light on some of the prejudice in our societies, xenophobia, some of the injustice in our justice system, then maybe that is something.”
The Good Fight: The Procedural Within a Procedural
CRIME(S): A Ponzi scheme that has cost investors, including Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), everything.
INVESTIGATORS: Primarily, Maia Rindell (Rose Leslie) who fights to seek the truth and clear her father Henry’s (Paul Guilfoyle) name—he managed the fund. Lucca Quinn (Cush Jumbo) and others help Maia. The FBI is also investigating, and Henry is imprisoned from the pilot.
SUSPECTS: Initially, Henry’s brother Jax (Tom McGowan), possibly Maia’s mother Lenore (Bernadette Peters); they both co-managed the fund with Henry. Henry himself remains a suspect. Maia herself is also under suspicion.
OPEN or CLOSED MYSTERY: Closed.
HOW THE TRUTH COMES TO LIGHT: In a most unexpected fashion, in the season finale. All is not what it seems.
WHODUNIT: Shhh! Our lips are sealed!
Set a year after the series finale of The Good Wife, CBS All Access’ spinoff The Good Fight opens on Diane, incredulous as she watches Trump’s inauguration on TV in the dark silence of her living room. Perhaps feeling that she would like to escape this real-life version of a Black Mirror episode, she decides to leave her firm for early retirement in the south of France. She announces her exit and pledges to complete her last case over her two weeks’ notice period before opting for freedom, forever.
Meanwhile, Diane’s protégée and goddaughter Maia passes the bar exam and starts a new role as an associate at the same firm. Maia’s parents are the fund managers of a portfolio in the billions. No sooner has Diane signed her exit papers, than Maia’s father Henry is arrested on suspicion of running a Ponzi scheme. He’s adamant that he’s being set up. Diane, who happens to have invested all her savings in the fund, is left with nothing. Her firm also wants nothing to do with her, having already reshuffled the partners, as well as seeing her as tainted by association with the scandal. Diane has, in fact, been introducing the fund to numerous connections, who have now lost everything as well. Broke and with Provence a distant dream, she needs to earn again and takes a junior partnership at a rival firm, where former employee Lucca now works. Feeling sorry for Maia—who has quickly become a jobless social pariah and receives regular and violent threats from anonymous sources due to the fund scandal—Diane takes Maia with her to the new firm.
The mystery behind the Bernie Madoff-style scheme runs throughout the entire first season of 10 episodes, as Maia sets out to find the truth and exonerate her father, with the assistance of Lucca and a few trusted others. Maia needs to clear her own name, as she sits on the board of a Foundation where, according to the FBI, the money was parked. Surely, Maia would know if she was on the board? The Good Fight premiered on CBS before showing its remaining episodes on All Access; the show’s narrative drive and our curiosity about what happened in the scandal are enough to make us jump from terrestrial to digital. Fraud and scandal may be familiar territory for showrunners Michelle and Robert King, but the slow-burn, season-long mystery is something different for the franchise. The Good Wife did ask if Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) was guilty of political corruption, but that question lay more in the background; we saw new information emerge only sporadically. Maybe we already had the answer we cared most about: Yes, Peter was incontrovertibly and flagrantly guilty of cheating on wife Alicia (Julianna Margulies). On the other hand, The Good Fight keeps us guessing about the identity of the fraudster until the season finale, minutes from the end of the episode. It’s a slow-burn with a decisive resolution in Episode 10.
The Good Fight also presents topical cases of the week: It operates in the post-truth society and is alert and aware of all that is happening around us. From that teaser with Trump to police brutality, corporate overreach to the war on terror (how it’s experienced on the ground in the US), the show delivers weekly procedural stories that feel edgy. The pilot was rewritten to include the latest politics, after Hillary lost in 2016. These meaningful topics and stories (some have a longer arc, such as the police brutality cases Diane’s new firm takes on) balance against that season-long mystery of the Ponzi crime. It’s a procedural within a procedural. It’s also refreshing to see women in all three lead roles, including the 65-year-old Baranski, plus a diverse group of subtly drawn attorneys at her new firm. The Good Fight has been renewed for a second season; its season-long mystery, along with its daring and relevant weekly stories, has proved to be an effective combination.
Search Party: Something From Nothing
Season 1
THE CRIME: After coming across a missing persons flier, Dory (Alia Shawkat) becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a college acquaintance, Chantal Winterbottom (Clare McNulty).
THE INVESTIGATORS: Primarily Dory, but she drags her friends Elliott (John Early) and Portia (Meredith Hagner) and her boyfriend Drew (John Reynolds) into the search as well. Dory is not a detective nor in any kind of law enforcement. Actually, she’s a recent college grad, working as a personal assistant to a ridiculously wealthy, eccentric housewife, Gail (Christine Taylor).
THE SUSPECTS: Search Party supplies a range of possible suspects in Chantal’s disappearance, but the most notable are: a cult in Red Hook run out of a store called Bellow & Hare and the Private Investigator supposedly hired by Chantal’s family, Keith (Ron Livingston).
OPEN or CLOSED MYSTERY: Closed.
HOW THE TRUTH COMES TO LIGHT: After paying a college friend $5,000 for information, Dory and the gang finally find out that Chantal is staying in a rental house in Montreal. Dory also discovers Keith was not hired by the Winterbottoms to look for Chantal, which immediately makes Dory assume Keith got Chantal pregnant as part of the Bellow & Hare cult and is now trying to track her down. Dory confronts Keith, the two fight, and Keith ends up dead—just before Portia returns to the rental house with Chantal. Chantal tells the gang she was dating a married guy named Farley, but he broke her heart, so her friend Agnes let her hide out in her summer house to get over the break-up.
WHODUNIT: Nobody!
Search Party, created by Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers and Michael Showalter, supplies the audience with multiple tantalizing theories that could answer Season 1’s overarching mystery: What happened to Chantal? The series takes the viewer’s obsession with whodunits and fan theories to the next level. We’re watching Dory act out her own personal True Detective, but Search Party’s main thesis seems to be that maybe life isn’t always stranger than fiction. Sometimes it’s just life. Sometimes there’s no murder, no cult, no double-crossing Private Eye—sometimes it’s just a self-involved girl who handles a break-up a little too dramatically. Search Party acts as a mirror to millennial self-obsession, building a whole season around Chantal’s inability to consider that fleeing to Canada without telling her friends or family would cause alarm.
Existentially, the series is an external manifestation of Dory’s own state of post-graduate confusion and restlessness. Chantal is missing, but Dory is the one who’s lost and rudderless. The hunt for Chantal provides Dory with her raison d’etre. This “case” may not offer life and death stakes, but it is, on a metaphysical level, Dory’s lifeline.
The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum describes the series as a welcome new genre: “sitcom noir.” Search Party is able to give the audience a whole season of the detective work we crave from slow-burn crime dramas, with a meta, tongue-in-cheek wrap-up worthy of any comedy of manners. It’s an excellent example of how to make smart use of the unexpected in our writing.
Fargo Is a State of Mind
Season 1
THE CRIME(S): Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) murders his wife; Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton) murders a slew of people.
THE INVESTIGATORS: Deputy Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman), Policeman Gus Grimly (Colin Hanks), retired State Trooper Lou Solverson (Keith Carradine).
THE SUSPECTS: Lester Nygaard, Lorne Malvo.
OPEN or CLOSED MYSTERY: Open. The audience knows what went down; now it’s up to the investigators to figure it out.
HOW THE TRUTH COMES TO LIGHT: Deputy Solverson cracks the case in spite of the incompetence of her boss, Sheriff Bill Oswalt (Bob Odenkirk), and the mistakes of fellow cop Gus Grimly.
Season 2
THE CRIME(S): Rye Gerhardt (Kieran Culkin) kills several people at a diner. As he’s leaving the scene of the crime, he’s fatally injured in a hit-and-run by Peggy Blumquist (Kirsten Dunst). Her husband Ed (Jesse Plemons) helps finish the deed when it turns out that Rye isn’t completely dead.
THE INVESTIGATORS: State Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson).
THE SUSPECTS: The Gerhardt family, led by Floyd Gerhardt (Jean Smart); Peggy and Ed Blumquist; the Kansas City crime syndicate led by Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine) and Joe Bulo (Brad Garrett).
OPEN or CLOSED MYSTERY: Open.
HOW THE TRUTH COMES TO LIGHT: Open season—turf wars and confrontations, police cracking the case.
The creator/showrunner of Fargo the series, Noah Hawley, once explained,
The funny thing about the movie is that it’s only the first scene of the movie that takes place in Fargo; the rest of it takes place in Minnesota. Fargo is a metaphor; it’s like a state of mind. It’s a word that describes a sort of frozen hinterland that makes you think of a certain type of story.12
I loved Season 1 of Fargo and as great as it was, enjoyed Season 2 even more—partly because it’s set in the 1970s, and I loved the production design, music, costumes and hairstyles. I think that stylistically—in terms of the editing and split screens too—it’s a really fun ride. Fargo is a limited anthology series, meaning that, like American Horror Story or True Detective, each season is a reboot, with new and returning actors playing different roles in a new situation. Fargo claims to be based on true crimes (although that is a fiction that the Coen Brothers invented for their 1996 movie, which is also perpetuated by the TV show’s creator, Noah Hawley). Each season has its own arc and is a complete entity unto itself. However, the seasons are united by the starkly dismal Minnesota/North Dakota setting and its unique tone—a delightfully wicked mixture of black humor and deadly, almost Satanic, crime sprees.
Season 1 introduces bad-guy-on-steroids Lorne Malvo, who arrives in Bemidji, Minnesota, with murder and mayhem on his mind. He meets henpecked insurance salesman Lester Nygaard in the ER, where both are attending to minor injuries. When Lester reveals that he’s just been bullied and insulted by an old high school frenemy, Malvo asks the million-dollar question: “Do you want me to kill him?” Lester doesn’t say no, a decision that proves to be a fatal error.
In the first two-thirds of the season, Lester is an atypical protagonist, with his weak morals and lack of conscience. He becomes a plaything in the hands of the super-evil Malvo, a professional assassin, and gradually Lester becomes a devilish tragic antihero himself. Good guys include Deputy Molly Solverson; Duluth cop Gus Grimly; and Lou Solverson, a retired state trooper who is also Molly’s father. In the pilot, Gus pulls Malvo over for speeding, but Malvo threatens to hurt Gus’ daughter if he doesn’t “do the right thing” and let him go; Grimly caves and releases Malvo without so much as a ticket. Gus hates himself for it but eventually finds his cojones by the end of the season, making for a satisfying conclusion.
In Season 2, we travel back in time to 1979, when state trooper Lou Solverson is a young man. Episode 1 focuses on the hit-and-run death of Rye Gerhardt, son of the dour matriarch of a Fargo crime family (curiously named Floyd). It turns out that the perpetrator of the unintentional hit-and-run is beautician Peggy Blumquist, a selfishly ambitious young woman who is married to a hapless butcher, Ed. The show follows the exploits of the Gerhardt family as they attempt to find and exact revenge on the “murderer” of their son (who has just murdered a number of people at the local Waffle Hut when Peggy hits him). Ed’s butchering skills come in handy when Peggy arrives home with Rye’s nearly dead body still attached to her car. The plot is ramped up further when a rival crime syndicate led by Joe Bulo and Mike Milligan move in on the Gerhardts’ territory.
Both Seasons 1 and 2 of Fargo are masterful examples of a crime show that is also a brilliant commentary on human nature.
The Season-to-Season Pivot
Series such as Chris Chibnall’s Broadchurch (BBC America/Netflix) present a closed mystery, which means that the audience only knows as much as the investigators. It’s a smoke-and-mirrors game where the writers show the investigators uncovering new pieces of information each “week” (or in each binged episode) in order to solve the mystery. At the end of Season 1 of Broadchurch, we find out who killed young Danny Latimer. (Danny’s killer turns out to be someone close to detective Ellie Miller, played by Olivia Colman.)
Chibnall then makes a surprising turn in Season 2, which does not introduce a new murder. Instead, it deals with the murderer’s trial and the infuriating way that his barrister tries to get him acquitted, even though he’s confessed. In the third and final season of Broadchurch, the show returns to its whodunit format. But Season 2 remains suspenseful, because we don’t know whether the killer will be convicted, or perhaps be set free and even killed himself by the furious townspeople.
In this way, each season-long procedural faces the challenge of writing themselves out of a corner in new and surprising ways. Fargo uses the anthological format with a whole new cast and “true” crime each season. Others introduce a new crime or central mystery and stay the course with the same cast, deepening and/or shifting focus to other characters, such as The Leftovers, Season 3.
Truth and Consequences
Serious drama or lighter in tone, the driving force that propels each series forward is the Truth. Sometimes we get the answer by the end of the season or series; sometimes we’re left with ambiguity. In some cases the truth sets characters free; in others, it leaves lasting, dire consequences. In all cases, characters must reconcile the past with the present.
There are also strong central mysteries in The OA (on Netflix, told like a missing persons case, about the past seven years in the life of Prairie, who has reappeared, was blind but can now see); Mad Men (on AMC, seasons-long mystery around how Dick Whitman became Don Draper); The Man in the High Castle (on Amazon; who is he and what exactly does “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy” mean?); This Is Us (on NBC; how did Jack die?); The Sinner (on USA; limited eight-part series starring Jessica Biel and Bill Pullman, based on the novel by German crime writer Petra Hammesfahr, about a young woman who kills someone in public but no one, including herself, understands why); and Goliath (not a mystery per se but a gripping, season-long trial). Homeland also gives interesting examples of slow-burn mysteries; from season to season, Carrie and Saul work to stop terrorism both at home and abroad. Strike is the BBC/Cinemax adaptation of the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith (otherwise known as J.K. Rowling). Each season spans two to three episodes of 60 minutes, in a medium-burn procedural that equals one of Galbraith’s books. There are two further books about Strike (Tom Burke), the modern private detective, with more sequels planned, so we may see more seasons. On the comedy sci-fi side, there’s the entertaining and surreal Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (on BBC America and Netflix), based on Douglas Adams’ books and adapted by wunderkind Max Landis. It’s a broad, quirky, fantastical, existential action-comedy, with buckets of blood and violence, starring Samuel Barnett as the eponymous Dirk and Elijah Wood as his befuddled, put-upon bellhop sidekick.
Bonus Content
Further analysis on season-long procedurals, including ABC’s acclaimed American Crime (created by showrunner John Ridley, who won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for 12 Years a Slave); True Detective Season 1; Riverdale; Medici: Masters of Florence; Happy Valley; The Fall; Bloodline and The Expanse is at www.routledge.com/cw/landau.
Notes
Episode Cited
“The Call of the Wild,” The Night Of, written by Richard Price and Steven Zaillian; BBC Worldwide Productions/Bad Wolf/Film Rites/HBO.