Other cop shows get more of the glory, but over three tumultuous seasons, TNT’s Southland—formerly NBC’s Southland, until it was dropped—has quietly proved itself a major player in the genre. It’s hard to tell why the show hasn’t done better in the ratings, since it’s in roughly the same league as greats like NYPD Blue and even, at its very best moments, The Wire. (I said roughly the same league.)
The show’s third season, which concluded almost a year ago, was its best: Rookie Ben Sherman (played by Ben McKenzie) finally earned his stripes, partly by working hard and partly by becoming the adult in his relationship with injured partner John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz). There was relatively surprising death and a strange betrayal, but season three also tied up pretty nicely, without much hanging as far as plot or loose ends.
So the fourth-season premiere, “Wednesday,” could almost be the start of a new series. It reintroduces many of the main characters efficiently, catching up without retelling too much: McKenzie is now a P2, partnered with former Detective Sammy Bryant (played with edgy delight by the excellent Shawn Hatosy). Cudlitz had back surgery and apparently kicked his pill addiction. Detective Lydia Adams (Regina King) has a handsome new partner whose last job was shooting at Iraqis. And C. Thomas Howell returns as sort of sad comic relief—the loose cannon, sexist joker.
That leaves some room for new characters, and either Southland is a good enough show to attract film actors or Lucy Liu and Lou Diamond Phillips are slumming it. The former is introduced as some sort of mega-badass with a sordid history and a YouTube video—I assumed it was sexy, but was proved very wrong—and the latter is a sort of stock cop who draws the line a little too cleanly between black and white, good guys and bad, and doesn’t really give a shit. He immediately has a dust-up with by-the-book McKenzie, who doesn’t think Phillips should be letting a little kid poke a dead guy’s head wound with a stick. (Apparently that's against protocol.)
As always, the show begins with the slightly cheesy but kinda effective freeze-frame and voiceover: McKenzie and Hatosy witness a man brutally beating a girl, and they give chase. Mid-jump, the show goes to black and white and the narrator talks about the horrors of being a cop in the most dangerous parts of L.A.: “Our worst nightmare is just their Wednesday.”
And then it’s on to the stories, which Southland has been remarkably good at since its beginning. Like NYPD Blue—which Southland creator Ann Biderman wrote for—the show is easy to enjoy in individual slices, but also serves up great serials. That said, this episode didn’t offer any clues as to what a season-long story might be, but it did pack a bunch of great little plotlines into an hour. Almost too many.
The one that didn’t work that well was King’s: A crackhead witness—and former high-school acquaintance—who had been relocated shows up looking for a place to stay (and probably a place to score). It doesn’t end well, but it serves more to reintroduce King’s conflicted personality—nurturer versus no-nonsense cop who requires emotional defenses—than to drive any sort of plot.
The beat cops do a much better job at the visceral stuff (including actual viscera): A gangland shoot-out in an alley leads to an incredibly tense chase through a grade school. And when the cops finally discover the shooter bleeding out in a bathroom, their reaction is nearly as disturbing as his bloody, soon-to-be corpse—they’re relieved that no one else was hurt, but angry at the gunman. Hatosy says to the gangster, who’s gurgling on the blood spilling out of the wound in his neck: “That is one big hole in a very important spot. You are definitely not gonna make it!” Howell adds, mockingly, “Just head into the light, brother.”