Much to everyone’s chagrin, Breaking Bad’s swan song airs later this summer. AMC realizes that they’re going to have everyone’s attention while their breadwinners wrap up
their historic runs. They must be sweating because they haven’t landed a major hit since The Walking Dead and if they don’t capture lightning in a bottle again their time in sun may soon be fading. I’m sure they are very aware of this since they’ve been green lighting every would-be successor. The most intriguing of the bunch in my mind is Low Winter Sun. AMC must think so too since they’ve slotted it directly after Breaking Bad. While everyone’s collecting their jaws off the ground (if Aaron Paul’s fanning the hype flame tweets are any indication) AMC is banking on the fact that you may be too floored to turn off your set and while your processing Hank giving Walt twenty four hours to get the fuck out of dodge, you may just give their new slow burn cop drama a chance.
As for the show itself, its tagline is, “Murder, deception, revenge and corruption that starts with the murder of a cop by fellow Detroit detective, Frank Agnew.” A show about corrupt cops in Detroit could the very essence of grittiness. Hailing from Detroit’s Canadian sister
city, I can attest that no city deserves The Wire’s Baltimore treatment quite like the D. If you shine a flashlight on Detroit’s seedy underbelly, you’ll see cockroaches darting every which way. People talk about skeletons in the closet, try the Detroit River. You’ll find two headed fish and bodies wrapped in plastic. If you haven’t heard of Detroit’s former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick’s fall from grace, it’s less scandal and more crime saga. Coincidentally, he was just sentenced to twenty to thirty years in prison yesterday (http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2013/06/kwame_kilpatrick_to_spend_20_t.html).
As much as I love Detroit’s flavor, it’s a city in decay and a perfect backdrop for shady cops to run amok.
The trailer looks promising. They’ve assembled a collection of character actors that are long-time veterans you know you’ve seen before but can’t quite place. That’s a trend I love about this golden age of television. Letting actors who’ve been working for decades sink their teeth into a role and letting them run with it creating indelible characters in the process. The Wire did it. Justified does it. They let the actor create the character who becomes a household name instead of finding an established household name to fill the role. What I am a little concerned about is the initial premise being a cover up of a cop killing a fellow cop. That’s directly ripped from The Shield and sort of run of the mill.
However, it has enough going for it that I’ll be surely giving it a shot. Here’s the trailer below:
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