Reflecting on the Police Procedural: the Quiet Genius of "Southland"

Last Tuesday, the season finale of "Southland" aired. This is a show that I am certain will never make waves, never break through to the mainstream, never get much attention. It has (and will for the duration of the series) fly under the radar. But it's quiet presence, in my opinion, perfectly reflects the quiet genius of the show itself.

Watching "Southland" is unlike watching any other cop show on TV right now. That sounds cliche, I know, but I truly mean it. One of the things that has always appealed to me about the show has been its dedication to gritty realism. It's shot on-location in Los Angeles, there is no background music (save for the occasional snippet of overheard bar/party music), the actors aren't all abnormally attractive right down to the last extra, and the show's move from NBC to TNT allows for crasser, less PC dialogue. It even stands out among other great cop shows. "The Wire" was brilliant, but felt like being immersed in a novel. "The Shield" was an intense experience more akin to walking through an LA-based, corruption-themed Hell House. "Life On Mars" and "Dexter" (the early years), while excellent, were never solely focused on the job of law enforcement as they were on the gimmicks. "Southland," on the other hand, is like a documentary that follows cops around on their daily patrol. It's a police procedural in the truest sense of the term.

In my opinion, one of the most fascinating parts of a good crime drama is the orientation of its moral compass. Black and white, traditional roles are like sweet treats. "NCIS" and the like are comforting little tales that present bad people doing bad things where, over the course of an hour, the good guys will come in and bring the criminal to justice. They're perfectly harmless, enjoyable nuggets of entertainment, but the morally gray cop dramas of (more often than not) cable networks really give you something to sink your teeth into. I loved watching the shit hit the fan on "The Shield," where every small misdeed built up over time until the show that seemed to glorify less-than-legal tactics ultimately condemned corruption in horrific fashion. Throughout the series, you sympathized with vile characters because they were, at the end of the day, all too human. "The Wire" stands alone at the top for a reason. It's modern-day society seen clearly in all its imperfection and contradictions through the lens of television, an artistic medium that often gets less credit than it deserves. "Southland" continues in this great tradition of moral ambiguity in that it brings up many storylines where I am genuinely unsure of which answer is right.

Take, for instance, one of the prominent main stories of this season involving Officers John Cooper and Jessica Tang. Tang, while pursuing a suspect, accidentally shoots a kid who was brandishing a toy gun. She hides the one piece of evidence that would have made it obvious it was a fake gun, leading to her superiors signing off on the accidental shooting while awarding her a promotion. Her partner, Cooper, is torn on whether or not to report her. When questioned, he sticks only to what he saw rather than what he thinks she did, leaving the decision to divulge more information up to her. She doesn't offer any, takes her promotion, and they part on ill terms in the finale. Their confrontation isn't as one-sided as we might think as Tang brings up Cooper's painkiller addiction from the previous seasons.

Tang: "You lied to save your own ass, and your fellow officers covered for you because they knew you were a good cop."
Cooper: "Don't try to compare me to you, because we are not the same."
Tang: "Keep telling yourself that."
Cooper: "I was an addict. I am an addict. I was weak and I will never forgive myself but I am fighting every goddamn day to fix it. You shot a kid. A kid! And you lied about it so you could, what? Move ahead?"
Tang: "It was a fucking accident! You think you know what's right and wrong. Who the fuck are you? God?!"

Had Tang left the plastic piece on the toy gun, revealing it to be an obvious fake, would she have kept her job? If she had come clean about it much later, would she have made sergeant? Does she deserve to make sergeant? Does one accident mean she's not a good cop? There's a quote from "Grey's Anatomy" that I always remember from, again, the earlier better seasons where Dr. Bailey mentions the difficulty of working in a profession with such high stakes.

Bailey: "I make one mistake with this scalpel and this man's dead. My husband, he makes mistakes at his job all the time. As far as I know he's never killed anyone but I have. And you will. Alex did. He made a math mistake and a man died for it. Run that past your accountant. See how he'd feel if every mistake he made, someone ended up dead."

There are certain professions where mistakes don't mean a clerical error, they mean the difference between life and death and that's not exaggerating. The television programs may dramatize this and make the characters and plots more colorful, but the reality still exists. And it is this reality of consequences that "Southland" handles so beautifully. One of the protagonists, Homicide Detective Lydia Adams, finds herself pregnant after sleeping with a married man. She debates whether to keep the baby, when to tell her superiors, whether or not to keep working. The audience is no clearer than she is on if she is making the right decisions or not. Therein lies the big difference between simple cop dramas and advanced cop dramas: an "NCIS" or "CSI" will tell you what the right answer is while a more advanced drama will not. A simpler show will lay out the right answer for you and use it to condemn a character or make us feel pity towards a character for choosing incorrectly. A more complex show admits that none of us knows the right answer and we have to just trust our inner judgement. And sometimes, as is possible, our inner judgement is wrong. To err is human. Look at Ben Sherman's storyline on "Southland." He gets overly invested with the wellbeing of the daughter of a prostitute and a pimp and begins to lose himself. His partner, Sammy Bryant, feels like he failed Sherman after he went back to patrol to help teach younger officers. If anyone knows the difficulty of restraint in the field it's Bryant, who fought to stay under control and not seek personal retribution after his previous partner was killed in front of him. But by the end of the finale episode, all is not well between Sherman and Bryant and we're left wondering what, if anything, will get through to Sherman.

I could go on, listing juicy moments from this season of "Southland." For any interested person, I highly recommend the first episode of the fourth season. One conversation that begins with "we're doing the right thing for the wrong people" is a particularly affecting comment on a criminal justice system that is flawed yet still the best we've come up with. If I had had the time, a weekly recap would have been interesting. But for now, all I can do is explain why "Southland" is a rare gem that deserves many more seasons, even if it never strikes a chord with the mainstream viewership. After all, that very same cool, deliberate intensity that keeps it from being a ratings smash is exactly what makes it such a rich, rewarding show.