Relatable tales yield to violent interruption

The Chi Now streaming, CraveTV

Set on the South Side of Chicago, a city that holds the dishonour of having America’s highest murder count, The Chi advertises itself as yet another up-close and personal story about life in the violent inner city. The Chi, available on CraveTV, has more to offer than its familiar display of drug-related shootings, corruption within a police department and the other hallmarks of crime stories that mean serious business. The show takes a refreshing interest in the everyday lives of children, some young as babies, some innocent as a trio of middle-school boys pulled into the surrounding violence.

It begins gently, even dreamily, by following a free-spirited teenage boy named Coogie (Jahking Guillory), who ambles around his neighbourhood on bicycle and stops late one night at a fence in an alley to secretly feed snacks to a drug dealer’s chained-up pit bull. Here, Coogie witnesses the shooting death of a high school basketball star; approaching the body, he unwisely helps himself to the victim’s personal things.

Rippling outward, The Chi acquaints us with a neighbourhood and the people who are in some way proximate to the murder, including the victim’s father, a drifter named Ronnie (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), who vows revenge. Noticeably missing in the detailed recounting of their lives is gang warfare, drug deals and shootings. Show creator, Emmy-winning writer Lena Waithe, is from the South Side; with showrunner Elwood Reid and the show’s writers, she has made sure that The Chi demonstrates the dignity in routine and the concept that home is home, even amid poverty and violence. It effortlessly and authentically sketches scenes of ordinariness, helping a viewer see that people living on the South Side do not exist merely to become the nouns in tomorrow morning’s bad-news headline.

Still, it isn’t long before we get a shocking reminder that The Chi is first and foremost a crime drama — one that sacrifices its most compelling character in the first episode.

I realize it sounds extraordinarily privileged to suggest that the South Side’s crime rate is getting in the way of the sweeter tales of a neighbourhood and its people. Perhaps that’s the strongest point The Chi makes: When you’re living in the middle of the nation’s highest body count, it becomes nearly impossible to pretend that life goes on. The narrative interruption is all too real.