Taste a little Boomtown

So if the point of Favorite Thing Ever is to make you feel an overwhelming desire to share our passion for the things we love, the question for your favorite columnist is: how do we hook you?

Back in 2002, The Spike (yes, again!) hooked me on this new cop show, Boomtown, by telling me about David McNorris. She characterized him as a Los Angeles Assistant District Attorney, a real straight arrow… at least when he was on the job. In his personal life, Spike added, he was an immoral, adulterous, hard-drinking disaster, and the dichotomy was tearing him apart.

Then, she told me Boomtown does cool stuff with chronology and point of view. They play fast and loose with the usual order of events in a crime story. They show you the end and work their way back to the beginning. They give you a scene as the cops see it, and then flip-flop and show you the criminal’s perception.

Sold! I started tuning in. This happens to me a lot–I’ll decide something’s not so promising, skip the pilot, then hear via the fannish grapevine that I was wrong, wrong, so very very wrong. As a result, I started playing catch-up with Boomtown‘s thoroughly stunning fourth episode, “Reelin’ in the Years.”

Playing with time? The episode is about a bank robbery that took place in the Sixties, one of those student radicals stick it to the Man, or his banker anyway, type of things, in which an off duty cop got shot. The dead cop’s partner is long since retired, but his son’s on the force now, and the two don’t get along. Why? Because something happened between them the night of the shooting, some trust-destroying, soul-destroying incident that would probably have gone unmentioned between the two forever. But now it turns out that the guy who has been rotting in jail for the murder maybe didn’t do it. Did he? Didn’t he? You won’t know for sure until the final frame, when we finally see the robbery play out through the slain policeman’s eyes.

If that’s not enough to get you right there, Boomtown‘s overall storytelling is great, and its Halloween episode is gut-splittingly funny. But Spike got me just right, because the true key to this show is its outstanding ensemble cast.

So first, as mentioned, there’s McNorris… Played by the electrifying Neal McDonough, the most charismatic cop show character since Andre Braugher’s Detective Pendleton, on Homicide, McNorris is a spectacularly screwed up, frighteningly driven, power hungry, self-hating, alcoholic and yet oddly lovable loon of a lawyer. He’s a show unto himself, this character, or he could be. But wait! There’s more!

Joel and Fearless: the LAPD alpha males, the detectives who get to wear plain clothes and solve the sexy cases. Joel’s got tragic backstory and the moral backbone McNorris lacks: like the A.D.A., he’s been tempted to stray from his marriage. (And it’s some considerable temptation, I’ll tell you!) Unlike McNorris, he says no. Fearless, meanwhile, is a war veteran, a killing machine who’s working through his bucket list, one new experience at a time.

Ray Heckler and Tom the Prettyboy: Okay, Officer Tom Turcotte is arguably the least interesting of the lot, but for the aforementioned Daddy issues, but if you go for beefcake I will mention that he’s played by Jason Gedrick, whose primary function on screen seems to be taking off his shirt a lot. But Ray, Ray, ZOMG Ray! He’s the same age as Joel, from the same academy class as Joel. He’s middle aged, saggy, still in uniform, and boy does Joel’s success get up his nose. Joel talks to the witnesses, Ray gets to root through dumpsters for evidence. It’s unfair because even though he’s an unpretentious, working class salt of the earth type, he’s also so sharp you could cut yourself on him, and he knows everything about the streets of L.A. But talent isn’t enough. Ray’s career is dead beyond dead, because his old partner was provably dirty. And maybe he was too… McNorris never managed to make a case stick, and the show got cancelled before we learned the truth.

Yes, cancelled. If all of this Ray stuff makes it sound like I’m talking about a show in its third season, this too is part of the Boomtown brilliance. These relationships have the complexity and long history that most shows don’t manage to create until they’re fifty episodes in.

Then there’s Teresa Ortiz, the merciful Angel of Death: Teresa is a paramedic. She’s the extremely attractive object of Joel’s unrequited passion, and she kicks ass and then bandages it up. I cannot explain Teresa; I dare not say a word more. It wouldn’t be fair to you. Really.

Finally, in season one, there’s also Andrea Little. She’s a poor little rich girl, she’s having sex with McNorris, and she’s rounding out both the show’s girl content and its range of crime-adjacent professionals: a big part of the point of Boomtown was that it wasn’t all cop, all the time.

Boomtown had an eighteen-episode run in its first season, got renewed, and then came back the following year in a streamlined, somewhat dumbed-down format. They ditched Andrea, added another female detective and put Teresa in police academy, all because, I assume, the storytelling format seemed too challenging to Someone in Charge. The six episodes of this second season that aired were still terrific, but they were simpler, and they haven’t yet made it to DVD.

Need more? Here’s the first ten minutes of the pilot:

The original season has a strong story arc and a good ending. It’s well written, brilliantly performed and significantly different from the usual run of cop series. If you liked this first bite, you’ll devour the rest.

Alyx Dellamonica lives in Vancouver, B.C. and makes her living writing science fiction and fantasy. Her first novel, Indigo Springs was released in 2009 to rave reviews. She also reviews books and teaches writing online at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.

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2 Responses to “Taste a little Boomtown”

1. kormantic says:

   Nov 1, 2010 at 7:35 am

   Heady stuff – I really like it when shows play with timelines. I will give this a go!

   Reply
2. Alyx Dellamonica says:

   Nov 2, 2010 at 7:32 am

   I hope you like it!!

   Reply