Fall television’s dynamic male-female duos
He-she detective pairing has a rich history on TV
Hollywood thinks in cycles.
A few years ago, science fiction couldn’t buy a spot in prime time; now the genre thrives. New York was the favoured locale for sitcoms; today it’s Los Angeles.
This fall another cyclical shift seems to be hitting its peak, this one in crime dramas. A few years ago, when it seemed as though every show carried “CSI” or “NCIS” in the title, crime was battled by an ensemble of elites.
But 2015 is the year of the pair. The male-female pair.
Ahandful of new series — Blindspot on NBC, Limitless on CBS, Minority Report and Rosewood , both on Fox — feature a twosome as the central characters.
And on Arrow, the formerly lone superhero Green Arrow (Stephen Amell) is being joined this year by a sidekick named Speedy (Willa Holland), the half-sister of Green Arrow’s alter ego, Oliver Queen.
They join the popular pairs from Elementary, Castle and The Blacklist to make it eight boy-girl teams fighting bad guys in prime time.
Unisex pairs are harder to find, at the moment confined to Thomas Gordon (Ben McKenzie) and Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue) on Gotham.
Given the growth of action-oriented roles for women on television, the tilt is not entirely surprising.
More surprising, perhaps, is that for a medium that in the past often pushed women into background roles, television has often embraced detective pairs of mixed gender.
Sure, they may have been the exception, not the rule. Sgt. Joe Friday always had a male partner. And of course, there were Starsky and Hutch, Crockett and Tubbs, Simon and Simon, and10 Speed and Brown-shoe.
But as far back as the 1950s, when Peter Lawford and Phyllis Coates brought Nick and Nora Charles to the little screen, mixed pairs on tele- vision have been, if not preferred, at least not unheard of.
Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg caused something of a sensation during the British-mad, mod mid-1960s as John Steed and Emma Peel of The Avengers, and Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) and Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) did the same with a more comic twist in Get Smart.
But the true breakthrough team for television came with McMillan & Wife, part of the NBC Mystery Movie anthology that also featured Columbo and McCloud. McMillan & Wife probably would not fly today without major retooling. Mac (Rock Hudson) was forever trying to keep Sally (Susan Saint James) out of harm’s way. In today’s procedural shows, the women form equal halves of the partnership, if not a little more.
Blindspot,
In Castle, characters Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) and Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) debate who has saved whom more often. If physical combat or weapons are involved, Beckett is the capable one.
In Minority Report and Limitless, the man in the pair has a superpower, but the woman is the trained officer and the one carrying a gun. In The Blacklist and Elementary, the man has the superior knowledge, but the woman bears responsibility for him.
Jaimie Alexander, who plays Jane Doe in the freshman series Blindspot, was chosen for the role in large part for her hand-to-hand combat abilities, which she showed off previously as the Norse goddess Sif in the comic-book movie Thor. In her Texas high school, she started the girls wrestling team.