If you need an excuse for a drinking game, watch almost any cop show and chug one down every time a cranky superintendent says ‘You’re off the case! Hand in your badge and gun’. They all do it, even the good ones: your flawed-but-brilliant hero/ine then slouches off in temporary defeat, lucky not to be fired or charged, only to triumph by whatever unlikely ruse the script committee has managed to agree about.
The Beverley Hills Cop movies did this well by making it the very basis of the plot rather than a distracting add-on. I imagine that scriptwriters saw the movie and said ‘Hey! Why don’t we make that a compulsory feature of every story arc in every crime series from now on?’ And left us with another excuse to do the drinking game (or if you’re me, the chocolate game).
Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley is the epitome of the flawed/brilliant/outrageously lucky hero cop, and the movie plots were refreshingly free of detective’s personal angstiness. Axel is, you could say, the antithesis of the dark and tortured Scottish soul of a Rebus or heaven help us, the dark & tortured Scouse soul of Chris in The Responder. His cheeky-chappie persona forbids introspection; he solves crimes by committing more and getting away with it while we cheer him on. And cheer is the right word here, because Axel’s cheerfulness always keeps breaking in and shining sunnily on a naughty world.
We could do with quite a bit more of this, what with the world being kind of extra naughty at the moment, so it’s good that the new season of The Rookie is now on Seven. They’re being canny bastards with it too: none of your stream-the-entire-series-on-a-wet-weekend nonsense. No, you desperate punters who still occasionally tune into network telly are being tantalised with the old weekly drip-feed, even when you use their catch-up service. It feels outrageous to have to wait like a ‘90s viewer for Monday night’s prime time. Remember when we had to try and watch The Sopranos or Buffy close to midnight, and put up with essential scenes being cut to fit endless ads? Getting the episodes in the right sequence wasn’t always guaranteed either.
But back to The Rookie. My 13-year-old granddaughter loves it, and I’m happy to watch it with her. I started by being cynical about its preachiness, but came to like it because it began to remind me of the days when crime series used to be about the mostly goodies chasing the mostly baddies, instead of the grey hopeless anomie that infects current crime drama, particularly Scottish, Scouse and Scandi noir. Ah, The Bridge in all its grey sequels and The Killing with its endless bleak repeats. Just the thing to settle you down if you’re getting too bobbish and above yourself, as Puddleglum the Marshwiggle would say, in The Silver Chair – my second-favourite Narnia book.
The French are guilty of this misery-wallowing too: Spiral started out as a fantastically interesting and credible look at Paris crime and politics but after the first two seasons the script descended (spiralled?) into self-indulgent punishing of the main characters: the decent characters, the sympathetic insightful ones all had to be tortured and in the end, I got tired of it.
The Rookie is the antithesis of all this amorality and pessimism. Nathan Fillion, previously in far more sophisticated and sardonic roles such as Castle and Firefly, is suddenly a kind of Elliott Ness, a highly conscientious character learning the complex rules and professional codes of the LAPD – come to think of it, the whole series concept looks rather like uncritical PR for that organisation. As John Nolan, a middle-aged man starting out in a completely new career, he is continually called upon to display a laundry list of high moral attributes, tested again and again by circumstances. Situational ethics indeed: do the ethics fit the situation or vice versa? Woe betide anyone in the series who oversteps the mark too much. Situations call for judgement, we’re solemnly instructed at numerous points. A couple of untidy edges might just be tolerated but no slippery slopes for you. Each episode has some kind of object lesson. If Nolan is a bit of a paragon, it’s a relief after the chaotic pessimism and chronic PTSD we find in John Rebus and The Responder’s hapless Chris.
'The Rookie is the antithesis of all this amorality and pessimism. Nathan Fillion, previously in far more sophisticated and sardonic roles such as Castle and Firefly, is suddenly a kind of Elliott Ness, a highly conscientious character learning the complex rules and professional codes of the LAPD.'
The Rookie’s characters hit the usual demographics and are quick to acknowledge their own privilege and faults. If it sounds performative, well, it is. It is a kind of utopian morality play set against the dystopia of Los Angeles. It covers the same territory as the incomparable and wondrous Bosch (in fact in a real meta-moment Nolan talks about watching Bosch) but in a way that has been sanitised and made more suitable for a 13-year-old to watch. For instance, in The Rookie, a filthy drug-dealing, woman-bashing thug tells someone to ‘shut the hell up’. In Bosch’s effing and blinding world I don’t think that even old church ladies would be so mealy-mouthed. So I suppose it would be better for my granddaughter to watch and discuss in a few years’ time. Maybe when she’s 40.
Bosch is the gold standard of police procedurals as far as I’m concerned. It is intelligent, feels authentic, and although the main character is put through moral tests that he does not always meet, he somehow rides convincingly through as a secure guide in a believably imperfect world. The dialogue is absolutely real: as scatological and convincing as that of Rebus and The Responder, but one big difference is that Bosch the person is far tougher in character than either of those. And when Bosch shoots a villain you nod because he is a warrior for the good side. You know he has to win; he is a smudged and battle-hardened Lancelot, the doyen of detectives, impossible to fool for long and sure to escape the machinations of the truly evil ones that he fights. Bosch steers through the dilemma of being authentic about evil by also celebrating goodness: a loyal dog, a beloved daughter, a passion for great jazz and a broad and sympathetic view of Los Angeles symbolised beautifully by the panoramic view from the character’s house up in the hills.
Rebus and The Responder are, like The Rookie, being rebooted at the moment, and what a misery-fest they’ve turned out to be. Unlike Bosch’s world, their storylines are unrelievedly full of ways to torture the protagonist, to present him with insoluble dilemmas of conscience, morality and loyalty, all to pursue a criminal who is always miles ahead of him, and who can always undermine him because the only way to beat a criminal like the criminals in Rebus and The Responder is to be criminal oneself. Which then of course becomes the Achilles heel of the entire investigation. Which one of them will actually end up banged up? Hard to say, but par for the course of so many like it.
In the meantime, if you find that you’re starting to feel that the world’s a bit blue and pointless after a binge of Scandi, Scouse or Scottish misery, try The Rookie. It might surprise you.
Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer.