3 out of 5

Created by: John Ridley

covers season 1

This is some heavy shit, Ridley.  But we didn’t really expect otherwise, and that’s certainly – I’d guess – what ABC was hoping would be delivered.  Like the non-Cronenberg ‘Crash,’ like other overly serious interconnected we-are-all-horrible-beautiful-humans things, American Crime plants a plot seed and traces it out to most of the affected characters.  The seed in this case is the murder of Barb Hanlon’s – Felicity Huffman – son, and those affected are his family, his wife, a couple disreputable types accused of the murder, and a third suspect, Tony (Johnny Ortiz), whose unfortunate decisions put him in the wrong place at the wrong time.  To Ridley’s – and his various writers’ credit – despite the script examining (through its characters) issues of race, sexual abuse and addiction, drug abuse and addiction, gang-life, suicide, and family, ‘Crime’ is relentlessly fair to its players, allowing them to make us gasp, perhaps, with their indulgences, but also allowing their arcs to fully play out, humanizing them.  This is helped by some dreadfully realistic performances.  All require over-playing their cards at times, so we know Barb is a racist and Aubry, girlfriend of one of the accused, is a drug addict, it gets balanced out by the mostly fly-on-the-wall filming style (often cropping characters out of frame to accentuate the overall sense of alienation that ripples throughout the show) and the matter-of-fact delivery of the same over-played cards.  Even a stilted performance like Ortiz’s as Tony, who causes some rifts in his family to bubble up to the surface – another theme, those ‘hidden’ problems – after doing a stint in juvie, ends up being the right fit for the show, as we all know versions of that uncomfortable teen, as we all know versions of the forever guilty father Timothy Hutton plays, or versions of the forever-cornered Hector, played by Richard Cabral.  But: well effected, well paced, it’s still a bummer of a show, as intended.  And it’s heavy, and it’s heavy-handed.  The central ‘whodunnit’ clearly becomes not really the focus, lumping it all onto a character study of flawed people.  Boiled down to feature length, it’s a tolerable piece of depression fiction before we emerge back into the distractions of video games and girlfriends, but as a series, though admittedly compelling, the intentions get a little foggy: these aren’t any new truths about the human condition, and so it’s a bit more clearly exposed as a piece of entertainment designed to keep us watching… which, uh, is maybe ironic or something.  Yip!