The American Culture

Yesterday, you may recall, I pointed out two TNT crime dramas with overt political messages parroting Democrat Party/Obama administration talking points. So, naturally, TNT ran another such program last night.

First, I will note that last night’s episode of The Closer was free of any political posturing. It’s good to see the program back on track after the previous week’s nonsense, and the episode was far more dramatically effective than its predecessor, as should be expected given the way didacticism tends to ruin fiction narratives.

That happy event was followed by episode three of the new crime drama series Rizzoli and Isles, about a Boston homicide detective named Rizzoli (Angie Harmon, Law and Order, The Women’s Murder Club) and her friend, Isles (Sasha Alexander, NCIS). Each episode follows the two characters as they try to solve murder mysteries in Beantown.

Last night’s episode dealt with the murder of a black teenage male. Intimations are made that he may have been murdered by a street gang with which he may or may not have been involved. Also under suspicion is a weird, local West African church which engages in rituals with voodoo overtones, the pastor of which is an ex-con who may be a thief and possibly worse.

The episode includes some interplay between Rizzoli and Isles regarding religion, in which anxiety-prone Rizzoli expresses fear and skepticism of the church while the breezy and self-assured Isles is both more overtly religious (Christian, apparently) and more willing to see the strange church as arising from good impulses and representing a different way of understanding Christian concepts. In short, Isles is both faithful and tolerant, an appealing combination.

Unfortunately, the episode is marred by some truly bizarre identity politics. (Spoiler warning.) With a plethora of black suspects, the killer turns out to be the boy’s stepmother, a white woman in her thirties. Her motive: she’s desperate to have children of her own, but her husband does not want to have any more, as he already is satisfied in having a son. So she kills the boy, by poisoning him.

That is one of the weakest and most implausible murder motives I’ve encountered, well, ever. (And I read mysteries regularly.)

What’s even worse is that the woman is portrayed as so innocent, weak, and needy that it is obvious all along that the knucklehead writers are going to pin the murder on her, as the Least Likely Suspect. Unfortunately, she is in fact the Impossible Suspect, and they would have done well to leave her that way and attribute the murder to someone with a real motive and a character that would enable them actually to kill someone, not to mention gather up the nerve to murder someone as close to her as her own stepson, with whom she had gotten along quite well, as far as the viewer can discern. (The husband has had no intimation of problems between the two, and he would be in a position to know.)

The identity politics here is truly grotesque: in a situation involving numerous highly sinister characters, the criminal mastermind turns out to be a middle-aged white female with a sweet and innocent personality. It’s true, no doubt, that people who seem perfectly innocuous do kill, but there was no reason on earth for the writers to make the black boy’s stepmother white in the first place, other than perhaps as an additional way of diverting the audience’s suspicion from her.

But what they end up doing is pinning a murder on the only white, bourgeois, and most family-oriented person in a world of gangbangers, hucksters, and other raffish individuals. The white person is thus portrayed as an insidious invader in the black neighborhood, and her apparent innocence makes her even more dangerous and evil.

In addition to being dramatically silly and politically mendacious, that is a ridiculously false portrayal of the reality of crime and human motivations.