A while back I recommended Slings and Arrows as an alternative for those who were suffering Wire withdrawal, and as time has continued to burnish my memory of watching that great Shakespearean series, I feel even more strongly about it. But television-watchers must have continual new fodder, and so I have had to seek out some of the other Canadian shows available on Netflix to fill the continuing gap. (The presence of Treme on “real” television has done nothing, it turns out, to feed my Wire hunger: beautifully shot as that new show is, it simply lacks the hateful characters, the devious misdeeds, in short the necessary violence that made the earlier David Simon series such a masterpiece.)
My two new discoveries are both set in Vancouver, and both are Chris Haddock productions. (I presume that Chris Haddock is, in some sense, the Canadian David Simon, since he creates, writes, and occasionally directs his own very personally inflected, somewhat grungy TV programs—but all I really know about him is that his name appears on these two shows.) The first one I found, which was made earlier, is Da Vinci’s Inquest, and it features a coroner named Dominic Da Vinci, a Vancouver citizen of Italian descent (though you could have fooled me: he looks and sounds Irish).
As with The Wire, the higher-ups among the “good guys” in Da Vinci’s Inquest are as bad as any of the perps, and a great deal of the pleasure of the series comes from hating them and their machinations. Da Vinci himself is an appealingly working-class guy (his father was a stonemason, as we learn in one episode), who is not a medical doctor himself but is in charge of a group of medical pathologists, including his own ex-wife. The ensemble acting in this show is terrific, and so are the bleak but also beautiful shots of Vancouver; but the main thing that makes the series stand out is that we get no real solutions to the murders. Oh, we may find out who committed the crime; we may even, occasionally, see that person brought to justice. But either the problem is too large to be solved by a single conviction, or the perpetrator is too connected with powerful interests to be punished sufficiently, or the crime itself is not, in legal terms, a crime, but simply the kind of accident that arises when society doesn’t care enough about its poorest, weakest members. Da Vinci’s Inquest is resolutely skeptical in its outlook—one might almost call it anarchic, if that didn’t imply a lack of concern, and Da Vinci himself is nothing if not concerned. He is the kind of subdued hero you can’t bear to part with, and the abrupt end of the series after a mere two or three seasons comes as a terrible blow.
Luckily, you can then turn to Intelligence, which I must say is the most addictive television program I have ever watched in my life. Even The Wire had its occasional longueurs, its moments when I was ready to nap if I had to sit through one more long speech about something; but I cannot open up a new disk of Intelligence without watching every single episode on it, even if this takes me to the small hours of the morning. The plots are so convoluted and the resolutions so infrequent that you begin to feel that you and the characters are juggling a million balls in the air, and yet the various people in this show are so persuasive, so viscerally present, that you never forget for a minute who they are and what they are doing in the plot.
At least one central character in Intelligence, the mob boss Jimmy Reardon, is played by an actor carried over from Da Vinci—that is, the excellent Ian Tracey. Other roles are filled by people I feel I have seen before in Canadian shows and movies (and sometimes American ones: James Garner’s old Rockford Files sidekick, Stuart Margolin, appears in a few episodes of Season One). There is a black crime-unit inspector, Mary Spaulding (played by Klea Scott), who eventually heads up her own spy shop, as well as variously backstabbing or helpful male colleagues who work with her; and there are many other mobsters with whom Jimmy routinely deals, including his partner Ronny, his bodyguard Bob, his sometime antagonist Dante, and his occasional ally, Fan. (Dante represents the Italian “biker” group, Fan the Vietnamese crew; all these people are engaged mainly in drug-dealing and money-laundering, though they do a sideline in murder and mayhem as well.)
The government figures sent out from Ottawa to oversee and intrude on Mary Spaulding’s difficult work do not impress one with their sincerity and intelligence, but the worst characters by far are the Americans from the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA. These people are so persuasively despicable that you are likely to find yourself mentally turning Canadian in response. (Reading in this morning’s paper about how Canada has handled Toyota differently from the way the U.S. has, for instance, I found myself unwittingly thinking: yes, we do things more sensibly here in Canada…a direct result of last night’s immersion in Intelligence.) At this point I only have one disk left to go in the second — and last available — season of the show, and I am already trying to figure out how I’m going to cope with that painful withdrawal.
—May 6, 2010