'Southland' accurately reflects cops, life
In a TV season boasting at least a half-dozen underappreciated comedies (such as The Middle and Raising Hope), a high-quality drama is less likely to fall through the cracks.
But, if ever a series deserves viewer attention, Southland does.
Now in its fifth season, the cop show is the kind not found on television anymore: stark, naturalistic, unafraid to let small moments count just as much as the big ones — sometimes even more.
When Southland premiered in 2009 on NBC, it was (and remains) an outlier in a TV landscape preoccupied with forensics, elite crime-fighting units and a tunnel-vision narrative recognizable only in Hollywood terms, where there exists a seemingly endless supply of technology, databases and the capacity for deductive reasoning.
Southland showed considerable promise during its first season, but it didn’t have ratings. It made the unusual jump to cable, where the budgets are inevitably tighter. But on TNT, with a smaller ensemble, a more focused show emerged — one that embraced its reduced scale with clarity and certainty.
To understand its appeal is to recognize what it is not. Eschewing the grim, explicit, cheesy imagery of a typical CBS procedural, Southland strips down to focus on police work at its most basic. As smart as it is mordantly funny, it exists somewhere on the spectrum between Hill Street Blues and The Wire, boosted by a shaky-hand-held-camera aesthetic borrowed from the long-running reality show Cops.
What Southland understands is that you don’t need elaborate plots. Life is complicated and often absurd, especially in law enforcement. This is a world that looks very much like our own, in which considerable sacrifices are made but strong moral codes and professionalism don’t always prevail.
Grounded by the wonderfully complicated performances of Michael Cudlitz and Regina King (as longtime department veterans), the people on the show are as lost and messed up as the rest of us, grasping and hoping somehow that it all makes sense at the end of the day.
More baffling is the lack of Emmy nominations for Cudlitz (brooding and droll and one of the most effective understated performances on television) and King (whose superbly muscled and calm exterior belies a woman with many doubts).
Southland works hard to be accurate about even minor details: that some patrol officers prefer their short-sleeve uniforms tailored close to their biceps; that wearing short sleeves at all is a privilege that rookies must first earn. Real cops admire the show for what it gets right. (Retired Virginia law-enforcement officer Lee Lofland analyzes the specifics each week on his website the Graveyard Shift, a terrific companion to the show.)
Just as crucial, Southland has the restraint and quiet confidence to allow its action scenes to unfold without juicing the moment with music. The drama is obvious. No manipulation is necessary. It is by far the most impressive and humanistic cop show on television today.