The Mysteries Of Laura: Season 1 (2014)

At one level, The Mysteries of Laura is an American adaptation of Los Misterios de Laura, the hit Spanish series about a policewoman trying to balance her career with her responsibilities as a single parent. At the same time, though, it’s an adaptation of Will and Grace, or at least a continuation of Will and Grace, a star vehicle for Debra Messing that plays a bit like Grace ten years down the track, during the time lapse set up by the final episode before she reunited with Will later in life. Nominally a fast-paced Manhattan police procedural, its tone and optic is thoroughly domestic, even suburban, with Laura’s investigations taking her to the suburban fringes of NYC, from Westchester to Rockaway, or revolving around crimes that depend upon the suburbanisation of the urban core, most memorably her investigation of a downtown meth kingpin whose main clients are bored housewives. Nearly every scene is separated by frenetic, hyperactive aerial panoramas – the first few episodes were directed by McG – that collapse establishing shots into commuting shots, the kind of perspectives relayed from traffic helicopters to people on their way home from work, while it never really feels as if Laura lives in the city, or even works in the city, although it’s filled to the brim with familiar New York sights and sounds, as well as a veritable panorama of spaces and places that might once have been considered gritty, dangerous or otherwise “urban.” That creates an unusual tone, since the lack of any properly urban backdrop prevents the police precinct ever really feeling like a place of work, but also makes everything feel so inextricably suburbanised and domesticated that the more sitcommy space of Laura’s home life doesn’t feel distinctive or privileged in any way either. If sitcoms marked the sprawl of suburbia into new and uncharted living rooms and emotional hearths, then The Mysteries of Laura is a sitcom that seems to register that that process is utterly exhausted, refusing to ascribe any originality to itself while not seeking to be original despite itself either, which is quite refreshing for a televisual milieu in which the sitcom seems keener to suburbanise eccentricity than ever before.