Cop

My Second Favorite Cop Show

Chris Leave a comment

While my friend and I were watching Pysch a couple of weeks ago, we got to talking about our mutual love for comedy, cop shows, and comedic cop shows. While we both obviously rated Psych as our favorite, we were both surprised to learn that our second favorite cop show was Castle. Me, because I want to be Richard Castle (a rich, eccentric millionaire writer with a nice apartment and the fortitude to not only write books but help the police solve crimes every week while pretending he’s doing research) and him because he’s like a broke, slightly funnier, and much less involved in crime solving version of Richard Castle. The distinction is probably the smallest one I’ll ever make, but we argued about it for half an hour, so it is clearly important to both of us.

It was interesting to see that we were basically in agreement on pretty much every point of the show. The only difference was our experiences with it. He watched it as it came out on TV and I purchased the DVDs. I’ve also made it further into the series he has, but that’s mostly because I had the DVDs and could watch on demand. Both of us eventually stopped before the end because the series started falling into that hole that long-running shows sometimes fall into, where more and more incredible things have to happen in order to keep the show new and relevant. He has no plans to continue watching it but I own the DVDs for every season and plan to get around to it at some point. We both enjoyed the earlier seasons more, when it was mostly protagonists flirting, hints at larger plot arcs, and the standard human stuff that goes on in everyday life.

 

The characters are great and Nathan Fillion is excellent in this show. I’ll admit that I’m a little biased because I’m a bit of a fan of his, but I think his style of acting fits the series very well, able to go from light-hearted comedic relief to intensely serious as the situation calls, all before wrapping it up with a touching little moment at the end with Castle’s mother, daughter, or his current love interest. In a single episode. The writing of the individual episodes manages it well, too. Despite the wide variety of emotions at play in a lot of the episodes, there is never a moment were it feels rushed or unduly chaotic. As I said, the writing runs into problems as the show goes on, but they do remarkably well for something that obviously hadn’t planned on running for as long as it did.

The extended cast is a lot of fun. Richard Castle’s mother and daughter provide excellent contrasts, allowing him to be the more serious one at times with his mother and the more playful one with his daughter. The three of them do an excellent job playing off of each other as they interchangeably help each other, give each other advice, and rein each other in. The other characters, mostly people from the police side of the show, help keep the show balanced by providing the main drama for each episode without completely losing touch with the more emotional side of the show.

The other protagonist, Detective Beckett, does an amazing job of calling Castle on his bullshit, keeping the police focused on their jobs rather than on Castle’s antics, and upstaging Castle almost every time he thinks he’s come out ahead. Unlike a lot of cop shows where the outsider protagonist constantly almost shames the police, Beckett proves herself easily Castle’s equal and much more likely his superior when it comes to investigation. There are a lot of times where he mostly just follows her around to flirt, make jokes, and accidentally stumble into a tense situation (or firefight) that she rescues him from. It is a refreshing change of pace when the damsel in distress is the male protagonist. He rescues her a couple of times, but it is mostly him tagging along and leaning on her. Beckett provides most of the plot arcs for the show and Castle’s are often just an accessory to hers. I enjoy the dynamic a little more than Psych’s where Shawn is constantly stealing the spotlight and setting up the story arcs. It feels a lot more realistic in Castle.

Eventually, though, the show loses the thread of its earlier seasons and starts trying to top itself, despite the fact that they more or less resolve the long-running character arcs and stories by season 5. They could have wrapped everything up neatly at that point, but they kept it going and things started to get a little messy. The plots started to get kind of convoluted, the season arcs felt like they were made simply to keep the show going, and the characters started throwing controversy into their personal lives just to give themselves plots for the season.

I feel like I encounter that a lot in TV shows these days. If a show does well for a few seasons, the network decides to milk it for all its worth. Scrubs Season 8 would have been great if they had just basically started the show over, letting all the old characters go except for a few who wanted to stick around and making it the start of something new instead of an attempt to continue something that almost everyone had left. The worst offender in my book is How I Met Your Mother. They had a nice, tight little plot that they wound up extending when they were given more seasons. That was fine, but continuing to extend it forever got very frustrating, since they wound up dancing around potentially ending the show at the end of the current season for a couple (or more) years.

Ultimately, if you’re looking for a fun cop show that’s good for a watch, check out Castle. You’ll enjoy it, have a good time, and chances are good that you’ll like it well enough to watch all of it. I’m just really bad at finishing things if I wind up stopping them. I suggest taking your time and trying to be consistent rather than binging it like I did.

My Favorite Cop Show

Chris Leave a comment

One of the first shows I ever watched on streaming Netflix was Psych. I’d just gotten my own account, since I had gone to college and my parents didn’t approve of me wanting to use their account to watch TV shows from HBO that involved the occasional bit of nudity and tons of murder (Dexter), so I got my own account. Around the same time, I became friends with a fellow English Major who works mostly on comics and she started what would eventually become a pattern of recommending TV shows I’d love by insisting that I watch Psych.

I did and I loved it. The casual humor that each character engages in feels so incredibly human and you can really see the bonds between the characters as they grow and change over the course of the show. The action is fairly low-key, always play third-fiddle to the mystery nature of the show and the comedy that keeps the whole things from getting too serious until the third season. There is danger involved in some of the episodes, but the plucky cheerfulness of the protagonist, Shawn Spencer, keeps it light until he admits that he needs to stop goofing around to focus on a case.

Shawn isn’t your typical detective, to be fair. He pretends to be a psychic detective in order to avoid getting in trouble with the police for always calling in spot-on tips for cases he sees on the news. In reality, he is using an extreme attention to detail, what appears to be a photographic memory, and amazing deductive reasoning skills to solve cases that are troubling even the head detective of the local (Santa Barbara) police force, Carlton Lassiter (which is probably my favorite name ever). Shawn shows up on the scene, makes a few while claims based on what he’s observed, and gets hired to help Lassiter and his partner solve a disappearance.

Shawn, excited for the new opportunity to goof around and get paid for the crazy antics he claims are his psychic powers manifesting, brings in his best friend, Burton Guster, who is a rather ordinary pharmaceutical sales representative. Gus, as he’s called whenever Shawn isn’t introducing him to someone new, is pragmatic, realistic, sensible, and cautious. He is the opposite of Shawn and keeps him grounded whenever he gets too caught up in his antics to focus on what is going on. Despite their clear personality conflicts, you can easily see how close the two friends are because Gus not only puts up with Shawn’s games, but leans into them with an ease that can only result from experience. Gus never misses a beat and is always ready to back up whatever hair-brained scheme Shawn is trying to pull as long it won’t get either of them killed, break too many laws, or result in Gus losing his job.

The two of them eventually open their own psychic detective agency, with Shawn doing most of the detecting and Gus managing the business side of things, even if he only does it reluctantly at first because Shawn forged his signature on a lease for their rental space. Throughout the series, Gus keeps their business running and Shawn grounded, while Shawn gets them cases and keeps their lives from stagnating or ever being boring. They make an excellent pair and the chemistry between the actors is amazing. Unlike most other characters who had to struggle through an awkward introductory phase before you could really feel their comfort around each other, Shawn and Gus felt like best friends from the very beginning, with all of the petty arguments, unconditional support, and touching moments of true friendship you’d expect of people who have been close friends for over two decades.

Unlike a lot of TV shows I’ve watched that were produced during the same period, the characters in Psych never stop feeling like people. Even my second favorite Cop Show, Castle, starts to lose that as the seasons go on and the characters just seem to be able to endlessly go on despite everything that happens. Gus gets pissed at Shawn and his behavior changes for a while. Shawn and Juliet, the detective junior partner to Lassiter, have a complicated relationship as they flirt with each other, that changes based on their development and other relationships. The chief of the police goes from being a grumpy woman attempting to do her best at her job and find a way to turn it from an interim position into a full one to being a warm but still very cross woman who won’t take any shit from her subordinates or contractors. Even Shawn’s dad goes from being an angry father with unreasonably high expectations of his son to being an important part of Shawn’s support network who just wants to make sure his son is doing well.

Now, even though it isn’t available on Netflix anymore, I recommend watching it. Buy the seasons or watch it on Amazon’s streaming service. I recommend buying it if you’ve got the money, since there are some weird audio/video sync issues with the Amazon episodes I’ve been watching that have taken almost an entire season to get used to (or have mostly vanished. It is hard to tell, sometimes). The eight seasons are worth your time and you will be laughing your way through way more episodes than you planned.

 

The Future Looks Bright

Chris Leave a comment

I like to experience anything new with an open mind. However, that’s a lot easier said than done when that new thing has been shoved in your face for a year (plus or minus a year) without you ever getting a chance to actually experience it. That’s why I avoid movie trailers and most video game news sites. Keeps me calm and unbiased when I finally sit down to something new. At the same time, I’ve only got so much time on this planet, so I try to get recommendations from people whose judgment I trust so I can do my best to avoid wasting my time on something. Which is why, against several recommendations and what felt like my better judgment, I sat down to watch the Netflix original movie, Bright, with an open mind.

The recommendations I solicited and the ones I encountered on the internet were all heavy with criticism for this Netflix original movie, but I think a lot of it is unwarranted. Sure, there is plenty of room left in the story for there to be sequels, but no part of the movie felt like it was specifically left in to shoehorn in a few more loose threads for potential sequels. There were a few moments that dragged along, sure, but they were relatively short and in the two-to-five range, depending on your preferences. The story set up the world and its politics succinctly and quickly, it developed the characters and the story very well, and it had just enough ambiguity at the end to leave you wondering if there was going to be a sequel. Which means there will be one because that’s what Netflix is in the business of doing nowadays. I think a lot of people overlooked the context of the movie when they commented on it: everything has a sequel these days, even things that shouldn’t, so of course you’re going to feel like they built one in.

The world’s magic and technology were delightful and just unexplained enough to be interesting without being too vague to feel real or too powerful to feel like anything other than a deus ex machina. The magic is a central feature of the movie, but they do a good job of not addressing exactly how it works until near to the end without making it feel like they left a gaping hole in the world. When you do finally get to see it in action, you finally get to see a world whose magic is truly above and beyond what any normal person could handle. Hell, there are some Elves who may or may not be using magic to fight people and their individual power level is ridiculous even without a magic wand. It was like watching a bunch of 20th level player characters walk into a town with nothing but level 1 guards who tried to apprehend them. Ridiculous, credibility-stretching slaughter right up until the protagonists started fighting them. To be entirely fair, they do a good job of establishing just how stupid-strong the protagonists are through some excellent background shots (Orcs are super strong and tough), and a really bad-ass slow-motion scene (with a magical “all the bullets I need” gun).

Since it is a fantasy story (probably urban fantasy), I’m willing to give it some leeway when it comes to what we usually call “realism.” Some of the characters made thinly veiled references to being in a story and one such reference was even the justification for a character to do something that had an extreme (1,000,000 to 1) chance of killing him. I want to believe that was a Terry Pratchett reference, as he often had characters reference the fact that million-to-one odds basically guaranteed it was going to work out. I don’t really think it is, though. The story is too different and there are much more accessible homages to Terry Pratchett that could have been included without breaking the fourth wall, such making a few obvious links between the police and the night watch in Ankh-Morpork.

If you like fantasy, want to encourage more well-made fantasy movies, want to encourage the trend of new urban-fantasy media, or just want to tell Netflix to keep it up in general, I suggest watching Bright. You’ll never get that two and a half hours of your life back, but I definitely don’t regret spending my time watching this movie. I might even watch it again with some new people who won’t talk during the whole thing. I love my roommates and all, but c’mon.