The greatest Chicago TV show ever?
The conversation at the bar was all “Game of Thrones,” that HBO television sensation now in the midst of its much-ballyhooed final season.
Never having seen one second of one episode, I shut up. Rather than eavesdrop on talk of dragons I had never heard of, I drifted back to a long-ago barroom conversation about another TV show.
It was 1986 and I was sitting with a couple of friends at Joel’s, that bygone North Side hangout for the local theater crowd, when actor Bill Petersen came over, grabbed an empty chair, sat down and said, “Did you see ‘Crime Story’? Wasn’t it great?”
The three of us shared our favorable opinions of this new NBC show, set in Chicago in the 1960s and starring former Chicago police detective Dennis Farina.
“You can forget all about that Don Johnson ‘Miami Vice’ stuff,” Petersen said. “Farina is going to be the working man’s hero. He’s the greatest actor in the world, and he’s going to make blue-collar people our new sex symbols.”
Farina did his best to do just that in what would be a very successful career, which ended with his death in 2013. As for “Crime Story,” due to some pesky licensing issues, it remained in a sort of television purgatory until recently becoming available on Amazon Prime, its first time on a streaming platform.
In short: “Crime Story” lives. It was first brought to life by producer/director Michael Mann, who was born and raised in Chicago and was then riding the success of his “Miami Vice” television series and the recent film “Manhunter,” which starred Petersen and Farina. (Both got their first movie parts — blink and you might miss them — in Mann’s 1981 “Thief ”).
“Crime Story” was created by Gustave Reininger, a former investment banker, and Chuck Adamson, a former cop and once Farina’s partner on the real-life CPD. This would be Farina’s first major role and the reason he turned in his badge after 20 years.
Though he did get some nasty reviews — “an actor with all of the warmth of Richard Speck,” wrote one critic — Farina is tremendous in the part. And he’s getting posthumous praise, as this from Vulture writer Nathan Smith earlier this year: “His eyes communicated a certain kind of exhaustion and intensity that could only come from a real, seasoned detective. Farina had a quiet charisma, a dignity earned from the experience visible on his worn face, but mostly, onscreen, he just felt like a guy doing a job.”
He plays police lieutenant Michael Torello, a tough, seen-itall street soldier in charge of a major crimes unit comprised of equally hard-bitten, hard-drinking cops. His chief rival, among a city filled with bad and violent people, is Ray Luca, an aspiring and bloodthirsty hoodlum spookily played by Anthony Denison.
With that Torello-Luca conflict at its core, the show examines all manner of other storylines and gives us a lot of criminals. Peppered with extreme violence, it also tackles personal relationships and conflicts, and in so doing it gives us drama on a very human scale.
One of the treats of watching the series again is to revisit the old city. The opening scenes of the 90-minute pilot episode, for instance, feature a robbery at Riccardo’s, the legendary bar/ restaurant at Rush and Hubbard Streets. The old lion house at Lincoln Park Zoo is here, as is Lower Wacker Drive in its spookiest days. Other landmarks pop off the screen.
But beyond this travelogue, there is a considerable kick in seeing some local actors at the outset of their careers. Most prominent among them are Ted Levine, a fine actor perhaps most well-known for his role of Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs,” as goofball gangster Frank Holman in 16 episodes; Gary Sinise in a couple of episodes; and Ron Dean, a fixture as Torello’s boss. There are glimpses of Jim TrueFrost, Will Zahrn and Michael Madsen.
There are also some casting curiosities, none more jarring than seeing jazz great Miles Davis as a member of a nightclub band. Andrew Clay is remarkably un“Dice”-like as a mobster and Pam Grier plays a newspaper reporter.
There were 43 episodes over the two years of the series, and I have rewatched them all. The show falters when the action and cameras move to Las Vegas, but its 15 Chicago episodes are terrific.
Lee Bey agrees. An author, architecture critic and ardent Chicagoan, Bey cited “Crime Story” in the 2017 “Best Of ” issue of the Chicago Reader. He wrote that it is a “spectacular police drama. … From the locations to the dialogue, nothing quite as quintessentially Chicago — save, perhaps, 1993’s ‘The Fugitive’ — has been filmed here since.”
We live in a city that gets a lot of cinematic attention and there is no doubt that local viewers watch such shows as “Chicago P.D.,” “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago Med” and the newer “The Chi” and “The Red Line” with a more discerning eye than most and are more likely to shout out at any geographical blunders: “There is no corner of Clark and Western!”
J.J. Tindall, a talented poet and longtime tour guide for Shoreline Sightseeing, is just such a person and he is hooked on “Crime Story.”
“I will spot any sort of mistakes in shows set in Chicago, and there are a lot of them, but I haven’t noticed any in ‘Crime Story,’ ” he said. “I kind of stumbled on this show, just discovered it.
“When it first came out, I was too broke to have a television set, so I missed it. But I love it. It’s a lot like ‘The Sopranos’ and I am watching very closely.”
Tindall is looking for himself. He flirted with acting as an extra in a 1984 film called “Grandview, U.S.A.” and remembered being an extra on the “Crime Story” set. But with no TV he was never able to see whether he made it to the screen.
He did and found himself in Episode 12.
“For about two more seconds of screen time than I got in ‘Grandview,’ ” he said proudly. “Buzz cut, green jacket in a diner.”
It is telling that Tindall mentions “The Sopranos,” for as entertaining as is “Crime Story,” it was also influential.
Smith’s Vulture story is headlined “Crime Story Set the Stage for the Last 3 Decades of Prestige Crime Dramas.” In it he writes: “Two decades before ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘The Wire,’ ‘Crime Story’ was one of the very first serialized prime-time dramas to ditch the procedural format and tell a season-long story. … Prime-time television had done the multiepisode arc, but no one had ever really attempted anything like this.”
It is a visitor from a different time, a different television era.
More than 30 million people, including me and Bill Petersen, watched the pilot episode of “Crime Story” when it aired Sept. 18, 1986, on NBC. Last Sunday’s “Game of Thrones” drew 17.8 million.