‘Crime’ focuses on the rural America collapse

Rose returning to CBS after op

LOS ANGELES, March 11, (Agencies): In its season premiere, “American Crime” introduces a new character by tightly zooming in on her face and then just leaving the camera there. It’s not a technique that is new to either “American Crime” or its showrunner John Ridley, whose screenplay for “12 Years a Slave” incorporated this kind of focused intimacy to Oscar-winning effect. But it is especially affecting in this specific scene, to the point that it becomes difficult to look at the character’s face again without recalling this long, introspective moment of quiet.

She’s sitting on a chair in a mall as a saleswoman applies a grown-up layer of makeup on her. It might be a moment of excitement for another teenager, but she seems disinterested in the process. She submits to the makeup with a child’s obedience, while seemingly preoccupied with adult concern. The makeup artist’s craft becomes an act of grotesquerie, like applying lipstick to a corpse. The camera never cuts away. The audience is asked to contemplate the girl, even though she only speaks briefly — to lie so blatantly that even the audience, who does not know her, can tell something about her blithe story is amiss.

The character, we learn eventually, is 17-year-old Shae Reese (Ana Mulvoy Ten), and she is a prostitute. Throughout the episode, even when she’s talking to other people, the camera shows particular attention to her face — the inward-focused eyes and pouty, under-aged mouth. She sits in the passenger seat of her car and turns that same face, with that same expression, on the landscape of her territory — rural North Carolina, with its dilapidated storefronts and chain hotels. We continue to watch her face after her first client, displeased with the makeup that makes her seem like an adult.

“American Crime,” always a standout show, has run the risk in its first two seasons of skewing a little too close to the territory of after-school specials. Last season’s story centered on a rape allegation at a high school football party, made by one male teen against another. But late in the season, the show used that kernel of a story to launch into an abrupt school shooting plotline — and though, all things considered, it was handled very well, it appeared as if “American Crime’s” desire to tackle serious topics outpaced its ability to do so with subtlety. Given that the show is a unique vehicle in every way — an anthology series with A-list talent, including an Oscarwinning showrunner, on not premium cable, not even basic cable, but actually on broadcast television — missteps were bound to happen. And what was fantastic about Season 2 of “American Crime,” despite its flaws, was how boldly the show dared to experiment, both in terms of what it tells stories about and how, technically, it chooses to tell them.

With Season 3, the show has struck pay dirt — perhaps because Ridley and the rest of the cast and crew, with two years of experience, have found a way to make their unique formula work. Based on the four episodes sent to critics (of eight total), “American Crime” seems to have shifted not just its subject matter but also its storytelling device away from the dissection of a specific crime, which can sometimes lend to the lurid and bizarre, and towards a less splashy but far more relevant exploration of the interleaving and codependent networks that create what we end up calling criminality. It’s difficult to discuss anything with social commentary without invoking Donald Trump in some form or another, and Ridley told press this winter that the topic of Season 3 was not dependent on who sat in the Oval Office. But “American Crime” focuses its third season on the collapse of rural America and its citizens’ subsequent desperation — which is, these days, a topic that demands to be understood more than ever before. There is a truth-telling clarity here that feels much more vital than the last two seasons of “American Crime”; this is a story of institutional failure, not just personal guilt.

And in creating a kind of socio-journalistic fictional document, “American Crime” is aiming, consciously or otherwise, to do what “The Wire” did for the drug trade in Baltimore in the mid-’00s.

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NEW YORK: Charlie Rose returns to television on Monday, following a recovery from heart surgery he says his doctors told him has been “exemplary.”

One of three anchors on “CBS This Morning,” Rose had a heart valve replaced on Feb 9. His return was announced on the show Friday.

Anthony Mason filled in for Rose beside Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell for the past month. The 5-year-old CBS morning show has been getting closer to market leaders “Good Morning America” of ABC and NBC’s “Today” show in the ratings, emphasizing a newsier approach.

The 75-year-old Rose, who will resume work on his PBS interview show a few days later, said he has no concerns about coming back too quickly.

“It’s not my judgment,” he said in an interview. “It’s the doctor’s judgment.”

Rose has a heart of spare parts. He had one valve replaced in 2002 and, after falling ill while on assignment in Syria in 2006, had another valve implanted following emergency surgery in Paris in 2006. Last month’s surgery replaced the one installed in 2002, which had been expected to last about 15 years.

He said he’d been having a little trouble sleeping and when a doctor discovered the valve was leaking, decided to move quickly and have surgery.