Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail continues to set up his television empire with a new procedural!
Genre: TV Drama – Procedural
Premise: When a young criminal law student is murdered, a black female cop who hates her job will try and solve the crime.
About: This one comes from Sam Esmail via his deal at Universal. The show is being made for ABC. Esmail will also direct the pilot episode. Newcomer actress Candace Grace will star as Vivien.
Writer: Sam Esmail
Details: 52 pages
I debated whether to review this one or not. On the surface, it looks like a hornet’s nest of trigger warnings. Or a warning nest of triggered hornets? Or a trigger-happy hornet orgy. The script is probably going to be triggering, is my point.
On the flip side, it’s Sam Esmail, one of the most interesting writers in Hollywood. Everything he puts out there seems to have this level of prestige attached to it that’s hard not to get excited by. So I figured even if all my buttons were triggered, I would still be an entertained hornet.
Criminal Law Professor Louis Gaetz delivers a rousing speech about crime right before his students head off for winter break. We follow one of those students, 18 year old Jimmy Russo, as he heads back home and connects with an old friend, Kathy. They go smoke some dope at the old skate park and Jimmy gets in a fight with someone from his high school, a black kid named Khalid.
We then meet Vivien, a black cop who wakes up every day putting a gun to her head, wanting to pull the trigger. Vivien isn’t really into the whole cop thing. She just wants to get through the day without killing anyone or being killed herself, which she’s managed to do so far. She’s being paired up with a new partner, Todd, who’s the squarest of square white guys you’ve ever met.
They get a call to an old gas station by a forest where they find poor Jimmy’s dead body. Jimmy isn’t just dead, he’s got an “NPC” meme carved into his chest. The two cops immediately visit the last person who talked to Jimmy, his friend Kathy. At first they’re suspicious about Khalid, who it turns out is gay and was fighting with Jimmy because he once tried to kiss Jimmy and suspected that Jimmy had exposed his secret.
But Kathy eventually reveals that Jimmy was accidentally placed on Professor Gaetz’s e-mail chain, where Gaetz and his buddies were not only making racist remarks but were stealing from house vendors! Jimmy wants to expose his professor, who eventually figures out his mistake, lures Jimmy out, then gets in a skirmish and accidentally strangles him.
Vivien and Todd come to Gaetz’s house, who doesn’t even pretend to be innocent. He grabs a gun and starts shooting out his window. He jumps in his car, drives off. Vivien chases after him, gets him to crash, then shoots him dead. We then flashback to after Gaetz left Jimmy’s body to see some random guy in a raincoat emerge from the forest and carve the NPC meme into Jimmy’s chest. The end.
The TV procedural is one of the oldest genres in the business. Whenever you’re competing against a catalogue of shows this large (we’re talking hundreds of thousands of episodes) you need one of two things to get your show on the air. You either need a really unique concept or you need really captivating main characters. The less you have of these two things, the harder your job becomes.
The reason I had confidence that Acts of Crime could pull this off is because it was written by Sam Esmail. Esmail has always been a unique writer who tries different things. He was cutting edge even before he hit it big with Mr. Robot. Back then, he was known as sort of a new-age Charlie Kaufman.
So imagine my surprise when this pilot ended up so standard.
Whenever you’re watching a show for the first time, you’re trying to figure out what the “hook” is. Oh, I get it, they’re stuck on an island and have to find a way off. Oh, I get it, a judge has to protect his son from a murder he committed. Oh, I get it, the cops use the newest computer technology to solve murders. Oh, I get it, we see the procedural through the killer’s eyes as opposed to the cops’s eyes.
I kept waiting and waiting for that hook to emerge in Acts of Crime, but it never did.
I’m not even sure the pilot makes sense. The whole point of the episode seemed to be to expose Gaetz as the killer then kill him. So then why, afterwards, do we cut to a random dude who just happened upon this murder, cutting an NPC meme into Jimmy’s chest? The episode’s over. We’ve found the killer. What difference does it make if someone has an arts and crafts moment with our dead body? It’s weird. Criminal even. But cliffhanger-worthy???
Wouldn’t it be more interesting if Gaetz wasn’t caught? By pure luck, some psycho stumbled onto Jimmy’s body, decided to carve a meme into it, and in doing so, drew all the suspicion onto him? Gaetz now gets away with murder and is lurking out there with his evil racist ways, teaching the future of America. Wouldn’t we keep tuning into future episodes to see if the cops figured out the truth and caught this monster?
I kept asking myself, “What is it the producers see here? What’s different about this show than any of a thousand other procedurals?” If I really stretched my definition of a “hook” I might say that Vivien is our hook. She has that big Mel Gibson Lethal Weapon moment early on where she almost commits suicide. She also hates being a cop, making her the “anti-cop” cop. She’s also kind of opinionated. She’s black and female. But, I mean, I didn’t even know she was the main character until the end of the pilot. I just figured she was one of many cops I was going to meet along the way. So if she’s the reason they think people are going to watch this show… I’m not sure that’s going to be enough.
I’m always mesmerized by the longevity of the procedural. It’s such a dated construct. I mean how many new scenarios can you come up with for someone getting murdered? I suppose the idea with these shows is to create 4-5 characters who are compelling enough that the viewer starts to think of them as friends that they get to visit with every week. But the whole reason I read this pilot was because Sam Esmail doesn’t write material like that. He pushes boundaries. Where was the boundary-pushing here???????
Mare of Easttown and last week’s The Mayor of Kingstown have proven that you can still write great 1 hour dramas. But you can’t slip even for a second. There’s too much competition out there. It’s more important than ever to take chances these days. And, unfortunately, Acts of Crime doesn’t take any. I was really bummed out about this one.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You can argue with me until you’re blue in the face about this but audiences don’t care as much about male murder victims as they do female murder victims. Take a look at Mare of Easttown. One of the reasons that show was so successful was we needed to find out who killed that poor girl. Contrast that with who killed an 18 year old college guy? I’m sorry but I don’t care. Think long and hard about who the murder victim is in your pilot or feature. If it’s not a woman (or a child) you better have a really compelling reason for why.
