LEARN BY EXAMPLE
S.W.A.T. and other police dramas trying to tackle race and other issues could take a page from This Is Us, Hank Stuever writes.
Having never said much about the rebooted drama S.W.A.T., it feels a little odd to barge in on the show's fourth season with a hot opinion. To borrow a term of art, it's forcible entry: Hands up, S.W.A.T. — the TV critics are here!
With probable cause. After a long delay in shooting schedules, the regular lineup of network shows started falling into place in recent weeks, some reaching for relevance with fictionalized takes on the coronavirus response and the killing of George Floyd. Bull returns, kvetching about how masks and distancing are cramping his ability to read a jury. Pandemic hospital chaos gave The Good Doctor a meltdown moment: “I want this to be over!” he demanded.
S.W.A.T.'s season première attempted to acknowledge a deep crisis in the law-enforcement genre. For years, the implicit agreement between TV viewers and the makers of easy-to-watch cop procedurals was that the audience would side with the police, a.k.a. the heroes, even when things didn't go by the book and someone had to knock some heads. When a TV cop errs, even the simplest shows take a moment to depict his or her inner struggles, past traumas, addictions or heartbreaks.
And whether we acknowledge it or not, decades of cop shows have shaped our view of arrest, detainment, search, seizure and deadly force — rarely stopping to notice that the characters on the receiving end were always the most expendable.
S.W.A.T. can't fix that, but unlike some of its peers, it's better poised to try. It depicts life among a tight-knit squad of the LAPD's Special Weapons and Tactics Team, headed by Sgt. Daniel (Hondo) Harrelson Jr. (Shemar Moore). Not surprisingly for a modern-day network show, Moore, a Black actor, replaced the white Hondo of yore (Steve Forrest).
Cop shows might do well to look at TV's few but proud family dramas — of which the reigning champion is This Is Us, which returned recently with a powerful episode that artfully braided the pandemic and the Black
Lives Matter movement into an achingly real reflection of the gamut of 2020 emotions.
Most striking, as usual, is Sterling K. Brown's performance as Randall Pearson, a Black man raised in a white family — one he knows and believes to be supportive and loving, notwithstanding a deepening rift with his brother, Kevin (Justin Hartley). The Floyd killing brings Randall to a new threshold of understanding his identity and alienation within the family that raised him.
Randall recalled all the incidents of racial injustice that made the news while the Pearson siblings were growing up, and how no one in the family ever talked about it. In their efforts to be colour-blind, they had been callously quiet. Randall tells his sister he's tired of putting their feelings ahead of his emotional and mental health.
He's tired, in other words, of being their perfect Black man, and the conduit for their feelings on race. It was a bracingly honest scene from a show that continually pushes its viewers into difficult, yet crucial, conversations.