This post discusses plot points of the first two episodes of TNT’s Public Morals.
Sometimes it seems like the culture wars are winding down. Same-sex marriage is the law of the land, and the few remaining holdouts are likely to lose their legal battles against it. Media figures are less prone to getting the vapors about pop music, and when they do the social media streams that have started replacing those traditional voices of authority can clap back at cable news prudishness. Marijuana is becoming legal at the state level rapidly and support for the broader War on Drugs is evaporating.
Anytime a war ends, the winners get to start writing the history of the conflict. In one sense, that’s what Public Morals — TNT’s new Ed Burns-helmed drama about vice cops in 1960s Manhattan, which airs its second episode Tuesday night — is setting out to do. The show hones in on the law enforcement officers who were paid to police America’s official morality in a very different time. This is a show set at the dawn of a grand, multi-generational tug-of-war around societal institutions and criminal laws that offered an official definition of American goodness for centuries.
The cops of Public Morals are supposed to bust gambling houses, arrest sex workers, and menace gay men across the southern half of Manhattan. They’re all crooked, of course, to varying degrees. Burns’ show looks for intrigue in the contrast between the morality his characters are paid to uphold, and their ability to rationalize making exceptions for the right price.
On paper, it seems like it could be a perfect concept for our times. A show addressing how individual policemen unevenly apply laws that are supposed to be uniform for everyone, at a time when Black Lives Matter protesters relentlessly highlight law enforcement abuses. A show addressing sex work and the complex economic and personal factors that go into sex workers’ decisions, at a time when the feds are busting Rentboy and Amnesty International is calling for the legalization of sex work. A show about the establishment facing off with a burgeoning counter-culture that will sweep away much of the national obsession with “public morals” in the first place, at a time of rising radical protest movements on college campuses, in neglected cities, and on Wall Street.
But good timing alone isn’t enough to make a good show. And a couple episodes into its run, things don’t look promising for Public Morals.
In its early episodes, Public Morals takes pains to present leading character Terry Muldoon (Burns) as a remarkably progressive mind for his times. Homosexuality is illegal and enforcing that prohibition is Muldoon’s job, but last week’s pilot episode went out of its way to dissociate its lead from bigotry. “You wanna collar all these poor bastards because they wanna get together and have a few beers and play a little grabass? I don’t,” Muldoon tells a new member of the unit. Presumably the cop’s claims to high-mindedness will get some kind of test when the show’s plot bumps into New York’s LGBT underground. But for now, Burns is planting a verbal flag in modernity without holding his character or show accountable to Muldoon’s claims of virtue.
The show’s world-building is similarly lazy about race. In that same conversation from last week, the new vice recruit refers to the unit’s lone black member as “the colored lieutenant.” Muldoon ices back: “Why don’t we call him Lieutenant King, alright?” If King (played by Ruben Santiago-Hudson of Castle and Selma) were a meaningfully realized character on his own, the moment might achieve what Burns intends it to.
But King seems to exist only to give Muldoon a chance to say that line. Because King is, at this point, just another one-dimensional body in orbit of the Irishmen at the show’s core — and the only orbiting body who’s black — Muldoon’s retort is a clumsy wink to the show’s modern audience. The moment reduces King from a man to a device for demonstrating how virtuous and ahead-of-the-times Burns’ own character and compadres are. It is a clumsy manipulation to get viewers in 2015 to identify with the show’s roguish, pasty, straight ’60s good guys.
Women don’t fare much better in the first two episodes. The show thoroughly fails the Bechdel Test, a feminist scholar’s classic metric of how artistic texts treat women. To pass, a work must show multiple female characters interacting with one another for purposes other than to discuss male characters. Public Morals doesn’t even show two women talking to each other until the second episode, and when they do it’s about the travails of the central male criminals and cops. One of the two is dead by the end of the same episode where she first appears.
The show’s many male characters, half cops and half crooks, get a lot more screen time but roughly the same amount of nuance and creativity. They’re all men of gruffness, dick-swinging powerbrokers and operators who play out classic father-son conflicts and grapple hypocritically with their own ethics. It’s a rich cast, with regulars like Santiago-Hudson, Rapoport, Brian Dennehy, and Justified’s Neal McDonough and bit parts from Orange Is The New Black’s Matt McGorry, The Sopranos veteran Al Sapienza, and The Wire’s Peter Gerety. But each seems stuck in a one-dimensional role defined by too-familiar-to-be-provocative notions of masculinity.
These representational issues won’t necessarily sink Public Morals. The show has a lot of plot to set up early, and might yet branch out once the scene is fully set. But the renderings of race, gender, and sexuality differences stack atop one another ominously. Without change, the show is on track to be a wholly conventional work — and one that fails to mine the most interesting seams of its subject matter.
The seeds of an entertaining crime drama are here, along with the kernel of a thematic structure. As its title suggests, Public Morals explores the distance between its characters’ public and private behavior, values, and character. It’s the second show this summer to seek depth in that contrast between how people disguise or massage their personalities and actions for an audience, after True Detective’s faltering second season looked for thematic traction in the masks that its characters wear.
Public Morals is struggling too, but in very different ways. Nic Pizzolato’s second season was exhausting because of its unendingly overwrought dialog and Vince Vaughan’s inability to pull off “gangster with a heart of gold.” Burns gets solid if unremarkable performances out of his whole cast in the early episodes of Public Morals. The dialog sometimes creaks with crime screenwriting clichés, but in general his characters pop along plausibly through the well-paced world-building of the early episodes of the show.
But without a course correction, Public Morals seems unlikely to produce the tonally and philosophically rich forms of pulp that won accolades for True Detective’s first season and other cable cop dramas like Justified.
Perhaps the better comparison is Mad Men, another ’60s period piece about a shifting America. To follow the AMC hit’s lead, Burns’ show needs to find room to indulge in the scenery more, to branch out and explore the flavor of the times in ways that aren’t directly motivated by plot concerns.
Delving into the marginalia of the show’s world is essential to finding something richer than cheap thrills and flat, false moral binaries. Mad Men itself weathered criticism over its whiteness and apparently narrow narrative focus by taking its marginal characters seriously, and over time the show conjured the sense that its focus on the Dons and Rogers and Joans of the country was an embodiment of the show’s critique of American history and mythmaking. Representational politics can often be too simple a lens to analyze television and moves, but works have to justify their choices about who to focus on by illuminating something richer and broader than the fictional lives it spotlights.
Burns can seek out scenes and characters that will put some substantive meat onto the potboiler dynastic politics of Public Morals’ cop and criminal families. Or he can continue treating the sex workers, johns, barkeeps, and black lieutenants of ’60s Manhattan as accessories to the professional and emotional progressions of its white men.
As the show finishes introducing its core characters and driving conflicts, maybe there will start to be room for era-chewing and peripheral richness. If not, it seems destined for the scrap-heap — splashy cast list or no.