Lance Charnes's Blog - Posts Tagged "criminal-element"

I’m involved in another flirtation with the Criminal Element. This time, it’s a review of a limited-run BBC2 cop-noir series, Line of Duty:

The normal British TV depiction of police work goes something like this: the hero DI or DCI and his trusty sidekick badger witnesses and arrest the wrong person a third of the way through the program before finally running down the culprit. If Internal Affairs appears at all, it’s as some annoying git who yaps at Our Hero’s heels and makes his pursuit of truth and justice more arduous than normal, before the IA git is finally shown the door.

But what if the IA git was the good guy? What if the hero detective was a showboating philanderer? And what if the entire system of British policing was portrayed as being rife with internecine squabbling, backbiting, fear and loathing, naked ambition, self-serving cover-ups, bureaucratic make-work and a complete inability to protect and serve the public? What would that show be like?

Line of Duty (available on Hulu in the U.S.) is what it would be like.

Read the rest of the article here.

South is featured on Criminal Element! And it's a great review, too.

South is a compelling futuristic thriller, as convincing a cautionary novel as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was in its day (and arguably still is)...I really got the feeling, reading this, that these were real people forced to live in terrible times, and I was only too happy to cheer them on—or cry over their tragedies—as the novel raced to its conclusion.

Check it out here.

I'm back consorting with the Criminal Element with a review of Transporter: the Series.

Transporter: the Series is the TV verison of Luc Besson's metal-bending saga of a driver-for-hire delivering “packages” at high speed for shady European customers. Chris Vance takes over the wheel from Jason Statham, but it remains all about pretty bodies and fast cars and crashes and elaborate fights, not plot or characterization. Don't expect Mad Men and you might have some trashy fun.

Read the full review on Criminal Element.

I’m back at play with the Criminal Element, this time with a look at the Australian police series City Homicide.

Why don’t we ever hear about Australian crime dramas? All nations have crime. They all experience murder. If their local film industries have advanced beyond talking heads and news, you can be sure they’ll make TV shows about crime and murder and the cops who have to deal with it…Down under, the characters speak English (of a sort) and the Australian criminal justice system isn’t any more exotic than the British one. Their police officers even carry guns. Get the accents sorted, and you can see that their cop shows are just as worthy as American ones…if you can find them.

Case in point: City Homicide…

Read the rest of the article on Criminal Element.

I'm involved with the Criminal Element again. This time, I talk about the difference between the popular conception of what spies are and do, and the somewhat less colorful reality of intelligence work.

"Say 'intelligence' and whoever hears you will come up with the usual associations: James Bond, Jason Bourne, Napoleon Solo (if they’re old enough and American), John Drake (if they’re old enough and British). A gun, a tuxedo, explosions, bad guys in red jumpsuits.

"Needless to say, that ain’t how it is."

Read the full article here.

In another entanglement with the Criminal Element, I look at the Australian street-cop series Rush.

Most Western police forces have, broadly speaking, two levels of response for field incidents: whatever the regular patrol officers can provide, and the commandos (aka SWAT). So what happens in a situation that’s too much for the patrol cop to handle but doesn’t warrant calling in SWAT (i.e., potentially shooting someone)?

The Victoria (Australia) Police created a third type of unit to plug this hole: the Critical Incident Response Team. And that’s what the 2008-11 Network Ten series Rush (now available on Hulu) is about…

Read the rest of the article on Criminal Element.

I'm abetting the Criminal Element again, this time with a look at the Australian cop series The Strip.

Imagine, if you will, that Jerry Bruckheimer was so taken by his time producing The Amazing Race Australia (yes, there was one) that he decides to create a cop show set in Oz. It’ll have all the Bruckheimerish trademarks: lush, glossy production design, lots of pretty people, less-than-Chekhovian character development, stories that don’t tax the viewers’ minds overmuch. Could it be his next Without a Trace – or the second coming of The Forgotten?

Too late, Jerry. Someone beat you to it. They called it The Strip.

Read the rest of the article on Criminal Element.

I'm abetting the Criminal Element again, this time with a consideration of the USA Network series Colony.

Alien invasions on the big and small screens have rarely been about aliens. They’re usually metaphors for whatever the scare-of-the-year happens to be: Nazis, communism, religion, lack of religion, race, colonialism, etc. Today’s scare-of-the-decade is terrorism and our response to it.

What’s the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? What’s the difference between proactive policing and oppression? Can a tyrant’s collaborator have good motives? Can a self-proclaimed “freedom fighter” have bad ones? Whose point-of-view gets to control the narrative?

An alien invasion makes it safe to ask all these questions in Colony, a USA Network series created by Carlton Cuse (Lost) and Ryan Condal (Hercules).

Read the rest of the post here.

In another brush with the Criminal Element, I introduce the new Sundance limited-run series The Last Panthers.

They really existed, you know. The Pink Panthers.

The Panthers were a confederation of Balkan thieves, many with military experience in the Bosnian and Kosovar wars of the 90s, who in 2000 started pulling off hundreds of audacious heists around the world. The Daily Mail gave them the name after they hit Graff Diamonds for £23 million in what was then the biggest jewel heist in British history. The thieves would disappear into the shadows in Serbia or Montenegro and live quietly with the complicity of corrupt or suborned local officials…

Read the rest of the post here.

While running with the Criminal Element, I checked in with The Night Manager. Here’s what I found:

If you’ve made your name writing about Cold War espionage, what do you do when the Cold War ends? If you’re John le Carré, you take a vacation, and then you turn your attention to all the other bad subterranean business in the world.

The Night Manager was le Carré’s first post-Soviet novel, showing that old dogs can still bite. Two film companies tried and failed to adapt the book for theaters. The BBC and AMC succeeded: their six-episode adaptation gives the story room to breathe...

Read the rest of the post here.