American Crime: Season 1 (2015)

With hindsight, it feels as if the path carved out by The Wire has turned out to be something of a dead end. In part, that’s because it’s impossible to envisage a show as perfect or as poised in its naturalism as The Wire – it effectively precludes any progeny, from David Simon or anyone else – but also because the language of naturalism itself seemed to reach a kind of limit with the series. By the end, the expanse was so epic, and yet the sense of despair was still so palpable, that naturalism itself started to feel like yet another mode of impotence, or even disengagement, which is perhaps why the fifth season started to resort to increasingly absurd and melodramatic devices, as if to undo naturalism from the inside. In that sense, American Crime is perhaps the true successor to The Wire, at least in terms of series that set out to anatomise American race relations, since it starts from the premise that naturalism is no longer an adequate language for a civil unrest that has seemed to grow even more melodramatic and surreal over the decade since David Simon’s masterpiece first screened. Revolving around a home invasion and murder in a small Californian town that galvanises the local Caucasian, African-American and Hispanic community, it’s hysterical, seething and manipulative as the most lurid media outlets – on both sides of the political fence – but that seems to be the point, as if series creator John Ridley had set out to capture and distill the affective intensity of a race crisis that seems to have somehow exceeded fiction in the melodramatic preposterousness with which it unfolds, offering up one utterly – or conventionally - unbelievable instance of subjugation after another. In that sense, it feels right that the series advertises itself as a “quality” experience available on commercial television, since the moment it enacts is one that feels defined, above all, by the sense that media has somehow evolved to the point where it is commensurate, for the first time, with the sheer multifariousness of institutionalised racism, the multiplicitous ways it can be platformed and mediated, along with the various ways it can be captured and exposed, with the present crisis standing in relation to the Rodney King beatings much as the current digiscape stands in relation to the serendipities of the hand-held digicam. As a crux in that transmedia flux– both quality and commercial, televisual and post-televisual – the series often feels as if it’s offering itself as yet another covert recording device, producing a sense of conspiratorial intimacy with its vast cast that supersedes any of their particular backgrounds or biases, in ways that quite powerfully – and surprisingly – reflect Ridley’s background in situation comedy. Whereas The Wire often felt like America from the outside, America seen from outer space, here the focus is not so much on compartmentalising, classifying or distributing spaces, classes and figures, so much as capturing America from the inside, in a convulsive, paranoid flux that signals its departure from quality television by refusing to fetishise the local or regional textures of this small Californian town in any privileged way, just as Felicity Huffman and Timothy Hutton utterly subsume and anonymise themselves amongst the rest of the cast, as evinced in Ridley’s decision to recast them as different characters in the next season, quite a novel move in recent anthology television. The result is a crime series that eschews any kind of panoramic detachment but is also singularly disinterested in the discrete, the local or the particular – a series that somehow thwarts both serial and anthology attachment – opening up an odd, discomforting, overmediated zone that’s traversed by both systemic and specific energies and injuries, but never quite devotes itself to either. Occupying that zone means throwing any kind of auteurist aspiration to the wind – one of the reasons Treme felt so conflicted, so oddly contrived in its spontaneity and improvisational freedom – as well as any residual humanism, with Hutton’s performance invoking Ordinary People only to calibrate how far we’ve come from that kind of tragic drama. Instead, Ridley presents us with something like a post-humanist take on race relations, a frantic, promiscuous scrambling to occupy the coal face of a vast and messy mediasphere which itself is scrambling to occupy each new site of racial injustice as it emerges, or before it even happens. No less than Simon, the impulse is journalistic, but it feels like it's appealing to viewers raised on digital journalism rather than the analog quaintness of the Baltimore Sun, sacrificing quality television for expediency television in what finally feels like a live offering, shot and watched in real time, rather than consciously cultivated drama.