charlie crews

By Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 26, 2007
NBC's new drama "Life" is the sort of show that makes a person want to write things that will be picked up for ad copy. Like: "If you only watch one new show this fall, watch 'Life.' " Or: "Terrific cast, terrific writing, and even when simply eating a pear, Damian Lewis sets a whole new standard for the broken hero genre." Not for the ad, but because they're true. And since "Life" has gotten zero buzz, there's a chance it will have a hard time finding an audience. Which would be terrible, since it promises to be such a great show.

This despite its obviously derivative nature: Writer Rand Ravich has created the latest "Monk" by way of "House." "Life" follows the strange and painful tale of LAPD detective Charlie Crews. Twelve years ago, Charlie was convicted of a gruesome triple homicide and sentenced to life. Only he didn't do it, see, as his heroic and lovely attorney Constance (Brooke Langton) proved. So now Crews is a free man, or as free as he can be after all the physical and psychological damage done to him in prison, with a $50-million settlement and a chance to return to the force as a detective.

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But that psychological damage is pretty extensive, with the result that Crews is more than a bit strange. Brilliant but strange. "Did you ask the dog?" he asks with an owl-like tilt of his head when officers are looking for a bullet at a crime scene. And, of course, the dog knows.

With the watchful half-smile and soft monotone of a psychopath and the sudden, stilted movements of a space alien, Crews is no sharp-tongued misanthrope or lovable neurotic. He's just Zen to the point of disassociation. "You don't have to understand here to be here," he tells his new partner, Dani (Sarah Shahi), who is teamed with Crews partly as punishment for past drug abuse.

Playing it long and lugubrious but with a tantalizing twinkle, Lewis (last seen in the States as the hateful husband in "The Forsyte Saga") may well wrest the mantle of sexiest troubled American played by a Brit away from Hugh Laurie. Like House, Crews has been damaged by the profession he serves; like House, he sees things that other people miss. But Crews is working toward transformation. His serenity, however, is obviously self-imposed and at times, barely there, a thin mask of hard-won wisdom veiling the pain and anger within.

"Don't you have anything better to do?" asks the husband of Crews' ex-wife after Crews has pulled him over, yet again, for some minor traffic infraction.

"No, sir," Crews says, taking in the glory of a perfect Los Angeles day. "Not at this moment."

L.A. sparkles in "Life," awash in sunshine and possibility, the perfect second chance Crews is doing his best to enjoy. He lives in a gorgeous mansion with Ted, a CEO busted for insider trading whom Crews met in prison. Apparently the gods were smiling on "Life's" casting director because Ted, who now manages Crews' money, is played by Adam Arkin. "And you live in his garage?" he is asked at one point. "I live in an apartment above his garage," he answers.

Along with Ted, Crews also has some pretty terrific quirks to keep him real -- no furniture, a passion for fresh fruit, a penchant for self-help tapes, a string of happy one-night stands, and a nice, dark sense of humor.

"That's a phone," he tells his former partner who wants to take his picture.

"It's got a camera in it. Where have you been?"

"Me, I've been in federal maximum security prison," Charlie answers with ironic good cheer.

As his feisty, smart partner, Shahi ("The L-Word") matches Lewis beat for beat. "Say 'Is it?' one more time and I'll shoot you," she tells Charlie when he lapses into a Zen-like repetition. Dani has her own troubles, mostly in the form of a Lt. Davis (a wonderfully hard-as-nails Robin Weigert) who seems intent on using Dani's drug issues to coerce her into making a case against Crews -- whom Davis clearly wants off the force.

A lot of people don't think Crews should be back on the force. The show opens as if it were a documentary investigating Crews' life -- here is his former partner, his former wife, explaining why they thought he did it -- and that conceit continues through early episodes, so we learn there are some people who still think he's guilty. But Charlie knows that if he's not, someone is, and the arc of the show, along with the various cases he and Dani solve, will be his quest for answers, and possibly vengeance.

Meanwhile, he's got fruit to eat, $50 mil to spend and a new lease on life. As, it seems, do we.
The new gilded age, enjoyed by so few and observed by so many, is having its corollary on television not merely in new series driven to chronicle the lives of the very rich ("Gossip Girls," "Big Shots," "Dirty Sexy Money") but also less perceptively in crime shows that pay homage to the fiction of the status cop.

Joe Mantegna, who joined the cast of "Criminal Minds" after Mandy Patinkin's departure, is playing a retired agent who returns to the F.B.I.'s profiling unit in the midst of a new and celebrated career as a writer and lecturer. He has cultural capital, but on "Life," a new series that begins tonight on NBC, a Los Angeles police detective, Charlie Crews, has literal capital, enough to accommodate a mansion, a Bentley, real-estate investment and a long procession of beautiful young women gliding up and down his spiral staircase ― women for whom his lifestyle prompts no accusations of shallowness.

This seems as good a point as any to note that Charlie is played by the British actor Damian Lewis, an Old Etonian whose television credits include a role in the BBC production of "Much Ado About Nothing." There is nothing patrician about Mr. Lewis's ruddy, almost dockworker look, but he wears an aristocrat's sense of entitlement with an ease that suits his character perfectly.

Not since the death of Jerry Orbach, who as Lennie Briscoe on "Law & Order" kept as firm a grip on his Greek-diner to-go cup as an Albee character to a tumbler of gin, has network television offered portrayals of law enforcers as believable soldiers of the working class. Dennis Farina, who replaced Mr. Orbach, looked as though he were born in Bensonhurst but dressed as if he kept a flat in Rome. The same type of distortion lurks on cable, where Adrian Monk, to take the most prominent example, is offered up as a genius and therapy addict, residing in a San Francisco apartment appointed as if to match the pages of a Restoration Hardware catalog. (If you have ever perused the character résumés of the field agents on "24," then you know that Jack Bauer holds a graduate degree from Berkeley and Tony Almeida one from Stanford.)

Like Monk, Charlie Crews relies on an astute facility for deductive reasoning bolstered by uncanny intuition. He has hunches, and those hunches are unfailingly right.

Charlie has come upon all of his money through a lawsuit leveled against the evil forces who sent him to life in prison for a murder he did not commit during the first chapter of his career as a police officer. The narrative structure of the show is incredibly satisfying: During each hour a crime is committed and solved, as Charlie's search for who might have framed him provides the overriding arch, satisfying our short attention spans and taste for long-form narrative at once.

Tonally, though, "Life" feels as a musical version of a Thomas Harris novel might. Tonight's episode begins with the grisly murder of a small boy and the discovery of a lopped-off finger. "Life," unlike "Monk," doesn't revel in the caper, which would pose no problem if it weren't working so hard to be quirky. Charlie's comic tic is an ambivalent relationship to Zen Buddhism, which has him making digressions like this: "I wasn't in the moment. If I'd stayed in the moment, if I'd stayed present, I would have been O.K., but I didn't. I was thinking about where we were going next, so I left the moment, just when I should have been completely in the moment, which is when people usually leave the moment, because the moment is just too much for them."

"Life," which also has Adam Arkin as a kind of all-purpose valet managing Charlie's finances from atop his garage, is in its moment as a reversal-of-fortune fantasy. Mr. Arkin's character, a former chief executive, had been to prison for insider trading, and Charlie saved his life there. In the show's equalizing vision of the world, people like Sam Waksal of ImClone end up in the same kind of penal facilities as murderers. What an implausible, piquant proposition.
After posting my early look at this new NBC procedural crime drama, reading your comments, and thinking about Charlie Crews in general, I have come to the belief that Life may actually have a chance this season. Not because of the crimes he and Detective Dani Reese solve -- hey, a murder is a murder is a murder. Not because of Charlie's mix of innocence and quirkiness. I think what is going to keep people tuning into the program is the whole sub-plot of the series: trying to find out who the heck framed Charlie for the murder of three people.

From what we see in this first episode is could be practically anyone he knew previously. Perhaps it's his boss, Lieutenant Karen Davis, who wants nothing more than to see him out of her department. Maybe it's his former partner, Officer Robert Stark, who seems to go about like Charlie wasn't locked in solitary confinement for a dozen years. Or, it could be any number of other people that may be looked into as the show progresses.

What this sub-plot will do is turn this procedural into a serialized procedural. Now, this can be good and bad for the show. If the hunt for those that framed Charlie is intriguing enough, and doesn't open 500 other little mysteries like another show on another network that is based on a tropical island, the audience may stick around awhile. If, on the other hand, the audience doesn't stick around the network may pull the plug. We've seen that this is a bad idea when it comes to serialized shows because those who remain with the program are anxious to see what happens next. Seeing that it was done so many times last season (Kidnapped, Vanished, The Nine -- remember them?) NBC may have to contend with a mass riot if they decide to move the remaining episodes to the web.

This is all just theory at the moment. The real proof will come on Thursday when the nightly numbers come in. In the meantime, let's talk about the first episode of Life itself. As I said in my early look post, the pilot is okay but the second episode is better. That's probably because, like many other shows before it, this one suffers from TMI (Too Much Information for the non-abbreviated) Syndrome. It packs so much information into 43 minutes of show that it's hard to follow it all. I know that this is used to setup the rest of the season. However, it leads to a bit of confusion.

Take Dani Reese for example. She's a recovering drug addict that's supposed to be in some type of program. However, something else seems to be going on with her. Promiscuity? A new addiction to sex and/or alcohol? I'm not sure. We get such a brief snippet of her outside life in the pilot episode that it's hard to tell. Yes, you'll say that it adds to the mystery of the character. I'll counter by saying that it really doesn't establish what the character is all about, and whether we should be supportive of her or angry at her. Again, yes, it's hard to make such a decision in the first episode. I say that while it is difficult, what we see of a character in a series premiere sets the stage for what we think of that character as the show progresses.

As for Charlie . . . As I said in my earlier post, the Charlie that we see in this first episode is a bit irritating. Eating all that fruit and showing ignorance of modern technology. I'll give him the fact that he doesn't know about Instant Messaging, although I believe Internet companies like CompuServe (blast from the past) had that type of technology way back in 1995. But, I can't believe that he never saw anyone in or near the prison talking on their cell phone. Not even the lawyer who sprung him out of the joint (sorry, had a bit of a 40's flashback there) talked on a cell phone or used a Blackberry while talking with Charlie in prison? It seems to be a bit of a stretch.

Besides those two things I actually like Charlie's investigative style. Because of his education in the way of Zen he is one of the calmest police detectives I've seen on television. He also has that fifth sense that some other detectives wish they had. A good example of this is when he finds the severed finger buried underneath the victim's dog. Another is when he smells marijuana on the shirt of the victim's stepfather. It reminds me a bit of the investigative techniques used by one Shawn Spencer of Psych.

Crews and Reese as a team remind me of Seeley Booth and Temperance 'Bones' Brennan of Bones, except in reverse. Take away Reese's off-putting attitude towards Charlie and she has that same type of 'please stop pulling my leg' feeling that Booth has every time Bones says something that's way out in left field. Charlie has Bones' matter-of-fact attitude and innocence. He's also missing that switch in his brain that stops him from saying something he shouldn't. Right now, since they are just starting out, they do not make a good team. However, if the show continues and the producers let these two characters grow, they could be a duo that is right up there with Bones and Booth, or Benson and Stabler of Law & Order:SVU.

You probably noticed I never mentioned Adam Arkin, who plays Charlie's financial advisor, throughout this entire review. Frankly, I'm not really sure what he is doing on the show right now. Comic relief? Well, Charlie can handle some of that with his reactions and mannerisms. Possibly Crews' external conscience? All right, I'll give him that; he does try to keep Charlie grounded a bit. I guess I need to see this character fleshed out a bit more before I really make a determination if he should still be on the show or not (like my opinion is really going to matter to the executives at NBC).

So, there you have it. I'm going to give this show a few more episodes to see if grows on me. Hopefully there will be enough audience to let this happen.