Tag Los Angeles

SouthLAnd: Graduation Day

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And so, with a building, searing intensity, the final episode of SouthLAnd‘s season three roared to its emotionally explosive conclusion.

Such a bittersweet moment for fans and presumably creators alike. As the opening voiceover reminded us, sometimes you just have to make that leap. Throughout its two year, three season, 23 episode history, SouthLAnd has been fearless and unflinching, never hesitating as it ran over the rooftops of network and cable drama, fast, fitter, harder than the rest.

With Graduation Day, the show delivered astonishingly, beautifully, heartbreakingly, poetically and ball-bustingly on all the narrative arcs it had set up and laid down in the previous 22 episodes. Such relentless emotional follow-through is rare in TV drama. Comparing the events of the episode to the original pilot script, broadcast as Unknown Trouble, it’s an intense and moving experience to see how the show has so powerfully come into its own. It’s followed Ben Sherman from that terrifying first day, full of the unknown trouble of the title, through to his, and the show’s, graduation. Although Sherman has often been a quiet presence, SouthLAnd has always been powered by his story. Both Sherman and the show now stand on the edge of a new era in their existence. SouthLAnd has done a phenomenal job of maintaining its core truths while aggressively evolving within its world. Season three has seen the show expand, despite the budgetary hardships of the move to cable — it feels bigger than ever, and that is a testament to the extraordinary creative team, working harder and smarter than ever to deliver the best cop show of all time, and one of the undisputed, heavyweight greatest TV dramas I’ve ever seen.

What an episode it was. Part graduation, part commencement speech for the future. And lots of running. With a story by Heather Zuhkle, teleplay by John Wells, direction from Christopher Chulack, and eerie, beautiful, raw and hypnotic lighting from Jimmy Muro, Graduation Day was a full court press from start to finish. This season has showcased great and powerful writing and directing from Cheo Coker, Chitra Sampath, Allison Anders, Muro, and many, many others. But you have to bow down to the showrunners, the OGs: when John Wells and Christopher Chulack step up to the plate, they don’t f**k around. The pedal goes to the metal and stays there.

Whether it was bringing a season’s worth of crackling tension to an explosive conclusion as Lydia sparred against Josie about dating her son, or fulfilling the promise of the first season by having Sammy finally become a father (in messed up circumstances to be sure, but it’s him and Tammi, it couldn’t be any other way), Graduation Day handled its storylines and emotional arcs perfectly. It was great to watch Regina King play Lydia’s happy yet complex arc in this episode, creating one of the most enjoyable storylines of the show to date.

Most cathartic and showstopping of all of the narratives was the inevitable, long-awaited showdown between Sherman and Cooper, as Sherman finally, monumentally lost it on his disintegrating training officer. McKenzie and Cudlitz unloaded both barrels on each other for this scene, tearing the scene apart with their bare hands. McKenzie had some work to do. Following on from his bare knuckle rooftop fight with his suspect (one of the most painfully raw, real, intense and prolonged fight scenes we’ve seen on TV), McKenzie had to raise his game to take on the mighty presence of Cudlitz, formidable even when he has to play someone barely holding on. It was a great, classic scene, resonating with all the force of its two-year build-up.

Michael Cudlitz laid it down in this episode, anchoring the entire show with the craggy, iconic power of his performance. His acting ranged from intensely physical (his truly heartbreaking attempts to climb the ladder), to painfully intense (“I did f**king chase after you!”), to devastatingly quiet and detailed (saying “thank you” to Sherman; checking himself into rehab). Cudlitz stepped up to the plate and batted 1000. McKenzie delivered too: after three seasons of mostly having to repress his impulses, he finally got to explode with full force and authority, literally tearing Cudlitz up from the street and laying into him: “you’re a f**king goddamn useless training officer.” It was great f**king television.

It was a hell of a season for Sammy Bryant. Throughout it, Shawn Hatosy prowled like De Niro, tore it up like Sean Penn, and brought a restless, relentless energy to the role. He had some gruelling, raw scenes, and he gave them everything. Hatosy had a powerful, extraordinary season. This episode captured all of it. From the scenes in the delivery room, to the catharsis of seeing Nate’s killer die (“Nate Moretta, motherf**ker”), to the revelation that his newborn son was called Nathaniel, to his desperate look at the photo of himself and Nate, Hatosy took the outstanding scenes and beats given to him by John Wells and brought them to life with beautiful authenticity. It was heartbreaking. And it made his final scenes all the more bad-ass: as he walked out in uniform with his new partner, the one and only Ben Sherman, Hatosy showed us just how damn awesome season four is going to be as they trade the quirky streets of Hollywood for the tougher world of Alvarado.

In this final scene, we also discovered that Sherman has graduated nicknames, from Boot to Pup. Although Sherman must have felt like he was back at the start in some ways, that wry smile on McKenzie’s face in the final shot said it all: this shit is only going to get better.

As the show heads into its seemingly inevitable season four, one thing needs to be made clear: we need more Michael McGrady, C. Thomas Howell and Arija Bareikis! McGrady brought his customary presence and gravitas, backing it up this week with some heartfelt emotion, anchoring the scene with Sammy at the end with fatherly concern and genuine worry. Howell and Bareikis are great together, with snappy chemistry and a natural rhythm.

It’s important to take a moment here to acknowledge that this was the season Jimmy Muro came into his own, and brought the entire show with him. As director of photography, Muro did extraordinary things with light on this season, taking the show’s raw, kinetic aesthetic, and imbuing it with the otherworldly sheen of an ethereal sci-fi dream. And as director of two episodes (Cheo Coker’s Cop Or Not and Chitra Sampath’s Failure Drill), Muro unleashed his vision, creating haunting, complex visual textures that recalled Blade Runner and Star Trek with their deep ambient quality and mesmerizing lens flare. Muro is the master of that legendary Los Angeles light: dealing with it head-on in the show’s signature bleached-out, oversaturated glare, bringing in new visual grace notes by reflecting magic hour light on the downtown skyscrapers. Muro brought vital extra dimensions to SouthLAnd, creating yet another way in which the show effortlessly, quietly, almost imperceptibly differentiated itself from its peers.

At the time of writing, no announcement has been made by TNT about the show’s future. Renewal seems highly likely with the steady increase in ratings (Graduation Day being the highest rated of the season), and the sheer bench strength of the entire cast and crew. This is a brutally high quality production, and it deserves a long future. Finally, the awards have started coming to the show: Regina King recently and deservedly won the NAACP award for Outstanding Actress In A Drama Series — this must surely only be the beginning of a wave of writing, acting and technical awards for this peerless show.

All that remains is for me to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone involved in bringing this amazing show to our screens. It’s had a huge impact on me, on my writing and my life. It’s been an extraordinary ride so far, and all the elements are in place for SouthLAnd to take it to the next level in season four.

Until then, I’ll leave you with John Cooper’s words of wisdom:

“Look sharp, act sharp, be sharp.”

SouthLAnd: Survival

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Over the freeze frame of the flame of gunfire came the theme of Failure Drill: “To protect and to serve, that’s the LAPD motto… But as most cops’ll tell ya, sometimes you’re lucky if you can just survive.”

And this was an episode all about trying to survive, trying to make it through the day, trying to just stay upright and awake, trying not to lose it, trying not to die, and, often, trying not to laugh so damn hard. The signature SouthLAnd blend.

Written by Chitra Elizabeth Sampath, Failure Drill was her first script for the show, although you would never know it: the episode was classic season three SouthLAnd, one of the best-written this season. It was an assured and playful script that did what SouthLAnd does best, being full of smart turns, sharp dialogue, jaw-droppingly “no that just didn’t happen” humor, swift and surprising reversals, and a clear line of sight right to the emotional heart of the show. She advanced major storylines, threw in great, thrilling and truthful character moments, and wove it all together in a fast-moving, never-stopping express train.

The show opened with Lydia being trained in the titular failure drill. This referred to a police shooting technique: shoot the attacker twice in the chest to see if they’re wearing a vest. If they don’t go down, shoot once more to the head. This is exactly what SouthLAnd does emotionally, and it proved to be a great metaphor for the episode that followed.

Sampath showed us Lydia at her absolute best, and Regina King took full advantage of the huge range that Lydia got to explore. Whether it was her masterful handling of the husband who murdered his wife, her empathy with their son, her deep struggle with whether to let herself relax and open up to the possibility of dating Morales, or her all-out action hero scenes at the end, King threw herself body and soul into all of it.

Shawn Hatosy had some great scenes too, showing us how he’s at the very top of his game, crackling with energy, rage and authority. Hatosy’s best scene was his priceless reaction to the staggering next level of Tammi’s insanity, which literally came out of nowhere in a fantastically perfect interchange, one of Sampath’s finest in the episode. A heavily pregnant Tammi showed up unexpectedly, interrupting Sammy’s questioning of a suspect. “How the hell did you find me?” Sammy asked her. “I put a Find My Friends app on your phone,” she replied. Hatosy’s reaction shot was f**king brilliant — Sammy could barely process this: “I’m a gang detective,” he manfully forced out in utter disbelief, “I can’t have a f**king Find My Friends app on my phone.” Tammi struck back with, “are we having this baby together, or not?” Her mission to completely f*ck with Sammy’s head continues successfully.

The main event in this episode, though, was John Cooper’s steady, seemingly unstoppable descent into hell, via his painkiller addiction. Sampath handled this with great subtlety and style, choreographing Ben and John’s scenes with finesse. Their “off the record” conversation was heartbreaking, but artfully messed up, in true SouthLAnd style. Ben McKenzie and Michael Cudlitz both gave the scene, and the episode, all the intensity they had, and it was great. Their arc also showed Sampath’s real strength: delivering character development and raw emotion on the fly and deep beneath the surface of fast-moving, brutal dialogue. All of which is frequently broken up by absolute jewels of brilliant comedy, like Sherman demonstrating the child car seats, or Adams discovering who Morales was related to — surely one of the most awesome surprises ever thrown at us by the show.

There’s no doubt that with this episode, Sampath executed her own failure drill on all the other cop shows out there, dropping them in three.

But as wonderfully written as this episode was, it’s now time to hail the relatively unsung hero of SouthLAnd, the master of light and motion, the man who turns the lens into an emotional perspective and makes everything look harshly beautiful, making LA look simultaneously just like it is, and like we’ve never seen it before: the one and only Jimmy Muro. Failure Drill was the best looking SouthLAnd episode of all three seasons. Muro, usually the director of photography on the show, directed this one, proving himself (not that it needed proving) to be the grand master of the show’s aesthetic.

He lit and shot the shit out of the show this week. Using hypnotic lens flare, brutal oversaturation, and great visual textures (from the golden light of the Hollywood day to the deep blue of dusk in downtown LA), Muro elevated the show to new visual heights, relentlessly pursuing a futuristic aesthetic that enhanced the emotional bullet-like precision of the show. As Lydia prowled the levels of the factory towards the end of the show, searching for the shooter who had massacred many of the workers, Muro lit the scenes like the end of Blade Runner, bringing a haunting art deco depth and future-retro timelessness to the atmosphere. He followed this up by lighting the final scene with Ben and Cooper like it was shot in an alien city many years from now, all shining blue-white flare and futuristic light. It was mesmerizing, compelling and remarkable.

Failure Drill was the perfect set up for the season finale, Graduation Day. As the fans await news of renewal (and maybe a blu-ray box set), we have the prospect of an awesome finale to look forward to. This is the show that keeps surviving, because it’s just so damn good.

SouthLAnd: Coker plays the blues

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In Fixing A Hole, writer Cheo Hodari Coker got to play the blues with his script, laying down classic grooves, finessing new phrasings, and blowing hard when he needed to. This script was like the jazz in Kerouac’s On The Road: raw, real, skillful and powerful.

The episode was also notable for finally bringing Yara Martinez in from the periphery of the show. She has a quietly hypnotic acting style that consumes her scenes in the best kind of way. Up until now, playing Nate’s widow Mariella Moretta, she’s been doing beautiful, haunting work with the briefest of screen time, but in this episode she got to take center stage with her warm, emotional artistry. In fact, this was something of a theme: Fixing A Hole was all about taking control, moving forward, taking your moment in the spotlight. What you do with that moment is what defines you.

It was a simple blues in some ways, asking the question, what makes a man or a woman who they really are?

Whether it was Lydia and Josie wrangling their alcoholic witness, Cooper and Sherman chasing down leads to find out what had really happened to 9 year old Michael Peterson, or Sammy taking his suspect out to the desert and making him dig his potential grave, the characters had to deal with or face up to their own darkness, or the darkness of those around them.

Coker invoked old time Hollywood as well as his usual perfectly chosen and delivered array of pop culture references, everything from Charlie’s Angels to Transformers (C. Thomas Howell nailed Dewey’s line, “where’s Optimus Prime when you need him?”), to the king of crime and old-school 40s Hollywood, James Ellroy himself. “I had a callback for L.A. Confidential,” says Lydia’s witness as they have dinner at the Pacific Dining Car (“James Ellroy’s favorite restaurant”), “then I found out Kim Basinger was interested. Story of my life.”

These kinds of references really make the script pop; they give it swagger and life. Coker is a master at this game, but he can write lines that fly at you like roundhouses. When Sammy tries to persuade a bank teller to waive a rule to make things easier on Mariella as she deals with Nate’s accounts, he clinches his case with “he was killed protecting your right to give her shit.” Damn. Elsewhere, Michael Cudlitz had the line of the episode, as Cooper loses his shit with a social worker. She tells him she has a master’s degree, to which he explodes, “And I have a PhD in street, who gives a shit.”

The episode was beautifully shot by Christopher Chulack, who is a maestro of the RED One cameras and the way they capture light. Chulack always finds the most interesting and yet utterly unobtrusive angles from which to play each scene. Allison Anders did a beautiful job finding the angles of truth in her episode Sideways, and Chulack did the same here.

Interestingly, SouthLAnd has always been deliberately sparse musically — aside from the pilot and one or two episodes after that in season one, it never used soundtrack music. That changed with Coker’s Punching Water episode earlier this season, which featured a montage to music. And with Fixing A Hole, Coker brings music to the streets again, introducing the great, booming blues song “Something On Your Mind” by Big Jay McNeely (I think this is the right version), first within a scene (as Sammy shows up to get his suspect), but then over the final shot of Sammy coming to grips with all kinds of realizations about himself, and his complex relationship with Nate’s widow. In many ways, SouthLAnd is the raw, painful ballad of Los Angeles, and Coker is one of the show’s finest players.

SouthLAnd: “Another f***ing happy day”

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What a season this is turning out to be for SouthLAnd. Each episode is an aggressive evolution from the one before, while still retaining the show’s core truths, values and style. It’s at the top of its game right now. Not that it ever wasn’t — it’s notable how strongly this show started with Unknown Trouble — but this season it’s powerhousing its way through complex storylines and brutal, unflinching character work.

If there’s a theme emerging for season three, it’s this: pitting the characters against the massive disintegration of their values, emotions, psyches and even their lives, in some cases. As a writer, you learn quickly: drama is conflict, great drama is high-stakes conflict — which pretty much makes SouthLAnd the reigning king of Shakespearean tragedy on cable TV. Everything the characters hold dear is f**ked with brutally and relentlessly. It’s like Hamlet with a shotgun and a badge, only the ghosts are real and never go away.

The Winds started and ended with John coming apart in the desert as the Santa Anas grew wilder. A bare, unforgiving landscape for his breakdown. Nelson McCormick directed this  — he’s becoming SouthLAnd‘s go-to director for the “disintegration” episodes, having previously handled Ben’s shattering revelations in Discretion. With a beautifully layered script from Heather Zuhkle, McCormick did an excellent job of bringing us into John Cooper’s complex world.

The episode could have been subtitled “fatherhood.” Cooper found himself inadvertently becoming a father figure to an abandoned child, in a series of low-key, moving scenes. Later, he aggressively stepped into the role of a missing father to a kid who called the cops because his mom beat him. And finally, he gave his verdict at his own father’s early parole hearing. His father was in jail for rape and murder, and John was as uncompromising as we knew he would be, despite the massive personal cost. Michael Cudlitz gave a heavyweight, authoritative performance this week, shouldering the massive burden of Cooper’s many demons and making you care, painfully.

The rest of the show was taken up with Lydia and Josie pursuing a series of rape cases, and developed their conflicts and partnership in a natural, seemingly effortless way. The two fought over policy, philosophy, technique, and I have to say that as great as Jenny Gago is as Josie, Regina King is a legend. It’s that simple.

The Winds had its moments of comedy too, best of all being Dewey and Cooper arguing over whether one victim “hanged” or “hung” himself. Dewey lost it and turned to Sherman: “Google it, Boot.” Needless to say, Cooper was right.

Of course, we couldn’t forget what happened last week: Nate’s death haunted the edges of this episode, and when Dewey asked Cooper if he was going to the funeral, Cooper responded with, “yeah, another f***ing happy day.”

Which could be the subtitle to this entire series. The Los Angeles streets are tough, brutal, unforgiving, and SouthLAnd does a tremendous job paying tribute to those who serve there.

Occasionally those passions explode: Southland, Punching Water

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“Start with the truth.”

So screamed Shawn Hatosy ‘s Sammy Bryant, handily summing up the show’s mantra in the opening scenes of this week’s Southland, the thrilling, brutal, blistering and frequently hilarious second episode of the show’s new season. Phenomenally written by Cheo Hodari Coker, and directed by Christopher Chulack with an even surer eye for movement, detail, light and Los Angeles locations than usual, Punching Water was the series’ high point to date, eclipsing past career best eps like Phase Three and What Makes Sammy Run?, raising the bar even higher for the show, and for TV drama.

What made this episode special was the heightening of the show’s fundamental elements, and the way they were combined with such sure control. Every element was punched up: the tight narrative style, the dry humor, the raw treatment of violence, and making small moments count for everything. Impressively, considering the budgetary restraints faced by the show this season, the episode not only featured all of the main cast (Lydia, Nate, Sammy, Sal, Cooper, Sherman, Chickie and Dewey), but even managed to bring all of them together in one superbly written, acted and shot, highly charged scene that also delivered one of the series’ greatest moments to date: the sight of Lydia slapping down Dewey. This was the flash forward that opened the episode, with the accompanying voiceover describing what happens when you bring together a bunch of cops passionate about their jobs: “Occasionally those passions explode.”

Despite being driven by a brutal sequence of multiple retaliatory murders across the MLK weekend, this episode also managed to be the funniest in the show’s history. There were many comic moments: Nate and Sammy’s back and forth (“playa, playa”), the other cops’ jibes about Sherman’s new lady friend, or, my personal favorite, Cooper screaming off in the patrol car with Sherman, leaving Dewey behind with a none-too-thrilled Chickie. Throughout, Punching Water ducked and dived with the confidence and sure step of a pro, like Ali, knowing when to hit you hard, and when to dance around.

The theme that drives Southland is what it means to be a cop, and Punching Water advanced this further, with awesome levels of gravitas courtesy of Michael McGrady, in a welcome return to the show as Detective “Sal” Salinger. He rallied the troops to get out to the streets to find the killer of a four year old, the latest victim in the wave of murders. Coker wrote a great speech, and McGrady completely nailed it. In doing so, he anchored the scene, the episode, and likely the season as well. He also initiated a first for the show: a montage sequence, which also marked the first time (more or less) the show has used a soundtrack since it ended the pilot episode Unknown Trouble with The National’s Fake Empire (which I talked about here). It was a departure, but it worked perfectly.

Although everyone in the cast did classy work in this episode, it was McGrady that landed the killer punch.

And that’s what the show ended with: a devastating emotional killer punch that concluded the show’s underlying theme this week, as summed up by Sherman: “love’s a bitch.” Love or lack of it was the catalyst of everything that happened in the episode, and the final scene was the perfect example of how this show can devastate you in seconds. Like a high performance car, this thing can shift gears seamlessly and quietly. You don’t even know it’s happening until it’s too late, the tears rolling down your face. This episode was a full court press throughout, saving its best shot for last.

Damn, this show is good.