I’ve figured out Southland kids. I’ve cracked the code!
It’s taken me a while to figure out exactly how I feel about Southland, but I think I finally have it nailed: Southland is a good show that has the potential to be very good and may even occasionally scrape its way to the fringes of great. In terms of the greater television landscape, I call that pretty high praise.
There are two big and obvious problems that I have with the show, and they are both very minor, but they contributed to my not getting a good read on things for some time:
* The opening theme music / credits are atrocious – That music creeps me out to no end, and seeing old black and white photos of serial killers and the weapons/paraphernalia they used doesn’t really fit a gritty, modern show ostensibly about what it’s like to be a cop in a big urban city and “live in the gray,” as John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz) explains to Ben Sherman (Ben McKenzie) in this episode. Plus, there’s the fact that I live in the Southland and the opening credits make me think that there’s a psychotic dude with a rusty machete on the perimeter of my lawn at all times, ever watchful. Patient he is.
* The voiceover / flash forward that kicks off each episode doesn’t work – After the credits and the somewhat ominous voiceover and flash forward at the beginning of each episode, I’m ready to think that there’s going to be epic carnage and bloodletting. But that doesn’t fit the tone at all: documentary-style, handheld camera, no soundtrack, and emphasis on realism.
I really think if they simply dropped these two elements (a silent shot of the Southland logo with a shot of LA in the background would work just fine, I’d say) the show would be framed much better for what it does best.
All of that aside, this was a pretty good episode because it showcases the two best characters (John and Ben) at their best. Ben’s first day riding solo was particularly engaging and dramatic, running the gamut from single-handedly finding a young Korean girl with Asperger’s who had “wandered off” to a brutal confrontation with a celebrity chef-turned-stalker. (The fact that Ben got the bad guy just after he did his worst says a lot about the direction and integrity of the show.)
The Rene (Amaury Nolasco) and Lydia (Regina King) pairing is growing on me as well. Rene brings some humor and spice into the mix and warms up Lydia, who has been fairly dour and serious in the past.
The official show recap (below) references Gil Puente (Laz Alonso) working on taking down Trinny Day (Wood Harris, he of highest The Wire fame), but that must have been cut out of this episode late or moved to a different one. Maybe that’s why the name of the episode doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either (apart from the notion of a submarine that can pop up and cause havoc at any time?), but maybe I missed a small detail.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.