Southland Review (Pilot)
Thanks to the wonders of Hulu I just watched the pilot for the new series Southland before its airdate on television.
In case anyone thought being a cop was easy, Southland makes sure you know it’s not. And that’s a worthy thing to do. Cops deserve an unlimited amount of praise for sacrificing really their lives to serve the public without even getting paid that well to do it. No one can possibly know what that’s like until they’ve been there.
All that said, the series still needs to function as a work of fiction.
In that regard I think it suffers in comparison to The Shield, to which it shares a number of aesthetic and plot similarities.
Like The Shield, Southland uses the “gritty” shakey handheld-cam, ends in a montage set to music of all the various characters states at the end of the episode, and is occasionally graphic or gory (this being a show set to be on network tv the gore is toned down considerably and the curses bleeped-at least on Hulu).
The main plot point concerns rookie cop Ben Sherman (Benjamin McKenzie) dealing with his first real day on the beat as a cop. Unsurprisingly it’s tough on him. The plotline is handled with care, but we’ve seen this before. The Shield juiced up the new-on-the-force angle by making its rookie cop both gay and a devout christian, so he felt alone and unaccepted on numerous levels. Southland doesn’t really take its main plot to a surprising level, apart from what Ben does to a suspect towards the end of the episode.
There are a number of potential surprises unexplored. When officers respond to a complaint of a smell the viewer expects a dead rotting body…and that’s exactly what it is. Arguably the perpetrator of a crime towards a little girl is surprising, but it was also unclear to me if that perpetrator lived in the home the officers found suggestive magazines in. So that plot point is a little unclear. But just in general there is a feeling of….that’s it? to the series, because we’ve seen content like this before, a lot.
Really Southland‘s premise is just, cops try to be cops in LA, which isn’t much of a premise. It delivers on that premise fairly well, but I think a series needs more in order to standout from the crowd.
Maybe Southland will go somewhere, but hopefully if it does it will surprise viewers more in its content.
I wish it luck, it’s nice to see a show where cops just try to honestly make it through the day as best they can in tough situations.
-Dan Benamor