92 TIME April 11/April 18, 2022
CRIME MAY NOT PAY, BUT CRIME
shows sure do. Especially right now.
While the genre has been popular
since the midcentury heyday of Perry
Mason and Dragnet, recently it seems
as though every TV trend has a kernel
of crime at its core: Scammer shows.
Maia sagas. Domestic thrillers. True-
crime documentaries and docudramas.
Many of Netlix’s biggest global hits—
South Korea’s Squid Game, Spain’s
Money Heist, France’s Lupin, the U.S.’s
Inventing Anna—speak the interna-
tional language of crime.
Procedural franchises, from Law &
Order to NCIS, have long been the cat-
egory’s most reliable moneymakers.
Yet since the era of The Sopranos and
The Wire, pay-TV platforms have been
cranking out prestige crime dramas
nonstop. Typically a serialized epic
with a hefty budget and a recognizable
ensemble cast, this kind of show cuts
across subgenres, striving for psycho-
logical realism and timely social com-
mentary. As the deluge continues, it’s
worth asking: What makes a great
crime show in 2022?
◁ In The Outlaws,
low-level criminals
ind common groundThree series that it loosely into the
prestige crime mold are set to debut
in early April. British dramedy The
Outlaws follows seven low-level of-
fenders rehabbing a derelict building
for community service. Tokyo Vice
adapts the memoir of a U.S. journal-
ist who covered the Japanese capital’s
criminal demimonde in the late 1990s.
And 61st Street centers on a lethally
mismanaged drug bust on Chicago’s
South Side. From an aesthetic stand-
point, all of these shows are solidly
made; the production values are high
and the backdrops realistic. What
separates them is how much attention
each one invests in the human person-
alities onscreen.THE MOST TRADITIONAL of the
bunch, AMC’s 61st Street—like The
Wire, American Crime, and The Night
Of before it—frames its story as a
micro cosm of a broken criminal-
justice system. Courtney B. Vance
stars as an aging public defender with
a bad prostate and a creeping suspi-
cion that he’s wasted his life ightingESSAY
Picking the worthy crime
show out of a lineup
BY JUDY BERMAN
TIME OFF TELEVISION
courts that will always be indiferent
to his poor, predominantly Black cli-
ents. The show, which premieres on
April 10, takes a panoramic view of
the sting, inhabiting the perspectives
of politicians, gang members, parents,
good kids in a rough neighborhood,
and clean and dirty cops. People speak
more as representatives of groups than
as individuals. “Look at me,” an oicer
tells a Black teenager. “You see a blue
life that doesn’t matter, right?”
Created by Peter Mofat, of The
Night Of and Showtime’s overwrought
crime drama Your Honor, it’s the kind
of show that might’ve broken ground
in the early years of the Black Lives
Matter movement. Certainly, its
themes remain relevant. But its mix
of generic hand- wringing over injus-
tice and coincidence- heavy thought-
experiment plotting has been done too
many times to make much of an impact.
Tokyo Vice, a bilingual action drama
arriving April 7 on HBO Max, at least
ofers a novel setting rendered in pilot
director Michael Mann’s signature
neon-noir style. Ansel Elgort plays Jake
Adelstein, the irst foreigner ever hired
as a reporter by Japan’s most widely
read newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun. As-
signed to the police beat, he stumbles
upon a tantalizing connection between
two violent deaths. As an outsider, he’s
too conspicuous to blend in, but too
cocky and naive about the norms that
govern interactions among cops, the
media, and various yakuza factions to
stop digging when his colleagues might
judge it prudent.
A Japanese co-production that’s
keenly aware of cultural stereotypes
on both sides of the Paciic, Tokyo
Vice mostly avoids the exoticizing
gaze that a`icts so many Western
portraits of the city. But even if you
put aside the sexual misconduct al-
legations that continue to follow El-
gort (the most serious of which he has
denied), it’s strange to see the preter-
naturally detached Baby Driver star
try to play a scrappy upstart journal-
ist. In an overabundant genre where
story lines tend to follow the familiarTHE OUTLAWS: BBC/AMAZON STUDIOS; PIERCE: MELANIE DUNEA