On Tuesday, September 18, I caught the second episode of Fox’s new crime drama, K-Ville. It was an interesting moment to come across Fox’s show, one made noteworthy by being filmed in, and thus employing the residents of, New Orleans, still devastated by the effects of Hurricane Katrina—interesting because I followed K-Ville by watching the final act of Spike Lee’s four-part documentary about New Orleans and Katrina, When the Levees Broke. One evening, then, offered two different takes on Katrina, from two quite different genres. And most interestingly, Lee’s documentary helps to make sense of K-Ville in a way that reviews of the show seem to miss.
It is nothing new to say that Lee’s four-part, over-four-hour documentary is the far superior product, even based on so small a sample of K-Ville as the second episode of the first season. It is possible, I suppose, that I might change my mind, although the episode I saw gives little hope for that, the New York Times‘ surprisingly forgiving review (on Monday, September 17, dealing with the first episode and focusing on star Anthony Anderson) notwithstanding. As many reviewers have said, what K-Ville does at its production end deserves applause (and, more importantly, deserves emulation): it films in and around New Orleans, thus offering one small set of jobs (hopefully union ones) to residents. It seems to hope to do for New Orleans what Homicide did for Baltimore: to make the location itself a primary character, a source of information, an honest locale from which the drama would arise.
One hopes that exactly that happens. The problem, however, is with the drama itself. Much of the episode I watched insults our intelligence, including but not limited to the heavy-handed attempts to represent Boulet’s (Anthony Anderson) traumatized state: he was the good cop who stayed while others, including his former partner, fled the city, and he has a very police-procedural tendency to fly off the handle, threatening everyone around him, suspects and partners, in an attempt to signify that he is a cop who cares, dammit. And further, he is a cop on the edge, dammit (although to be fair, a post-Katrina New Orleans is about the only place one could get away with a cop show with yet another cop on the edge from day one). The police procedural aspects of the show could use some serious work, and that along with the scenery-chewing hint at the shows biggest problems. The mystery of the first episode was one of the most obvious I’ve ever seen on television. The police, then, end up looking like fools for having such a hard time figuring out a crime that seems so clear that it had no hope but to be found out. One starts to wonder: weren’t there shows with smart, driven, genuinely complex homicide cops, once upon a time?
Reviews I’ve read (I’m thinking of both the Times and Entertainment Weekly) fault K-Ville for its far-fetched conspiracy theory plots. In the first episode, a murder investigation goes all the way to City Hall (don’t they all, these days?) and in the second, a seemingly good rich white woman, supposedly working to help rebuild the decimated Lower Ninth Ward, is in fact in the process of furthering its decimation, buying up properties. She is revealed as the quintessential white liberal whose do-gooder veneeer barely covers a seething racism (admittedly supposedly created by the murder of her brother at the hands of muggers a year before); her revelation comes complete with angry words about “those people” of the Ninth, a code that, thankfully, the show doesn’t, at that particular moment at least, insult our collective intelligence by explaining.
However, having watched K-Ville along with When the Levees Broke, I find myself interested in a different reading of the paranoia and conspiracy theorizing that seems to structure its first two episodes. This re-reading does not resurrect the show as some sort of dramatic success, but it does make make think of a different way of reading what happens on the small screen. For a white, non-New Orleans audience, Lee’s documentary offers a tour of the conspiracy theories that structure some of the African-American response to the tragedy, but of central importance is the way in which Lee gives viewers the information and evidence through which to see these theories not as products of wild imaginations, but rather as perfectly reasonable hypotheses based on the historical and present-day treatment of New Orleans residents, and especially black New Orleans residents.
Lee (or the New Orleans residents, hurricane experts, and historians who provide almost all of the content of Levees) takes us back to previous hurricanes and floods, describing intentional breaks placed into flood walls that drown out poorer neighborhoods while protecting richer ones, in order to best understand the theory that the Lower Ninth Ward flood wall had been intentionally dynamited to save other parts of New Orleans (or its suburbs).
Add to the mix the well-established fact that a white suburb of New Orleans turned back New Orleans residents at gunpoint as they tried to flee the devastation of the flooding. Add again the incredibly slow response of FEMA and the federal government, the lack of support, of food, of water, of trailers for living. Add President Bush’s early reaction of not seeming to take the hurricane seriously, and the utter failure of his government to ever step up to the plate, while being incredibly adept at passing the buck on the reasons for that slow response. Add the bodies left rotting in houses by a government that seems to have no trouble funding its expensive war abroad. Add the way that mass media termed hurricane survivors, displaced from their homes, as refugees (as if, as many in the documentary point out, they had somehow ceased to be citizens of the United States because their homes were destroyed). Add to that the fact that many were treated as if they were, in fact, not citizens (witness the way that the National Guard’s attempt to offer aid was felt by many to be an occupation). Add a black man’s story of being shot by a white man while just walking down the street in the days following the hurricane.
Add all that and more, and K-Ville’s supposedly outlandish plots start to look slightly different. They still might not quite work within the well-established structures of the cop-show paradigm, and the fact that this show seems hell-bent on bringing out cliches of these shows from the pre-Homicide days does not help (Homicide being the show that was supposed to have put to death the cliches of the cop show, although those cliches seem to rise again and again, like the undead). However, those plots, and their conspiracy twists, might prove more compelling if one views them as the dramatization of the very reasonable (and in many instances seemingly quite accurate) conclusions, by many in New Orleans, that repeatedly the powers that be treat their city and its residents as disposable objects to be used and discarded (and, if possible, to be turned into profit).
And yet: Boulet’s partner Cobb (Cole Hauser) turns out to be not a cop who has transferred from Cincinnati but an ex-con who decided to restart his life by being a cop? I assume it’s meant to add depth and complexity to he show—all that noir-ish connection of cop and criminal—but, seriously?
But finally, if anyone has read this far, accept no excuse for not seeing Lee’s documentary. Don’t be put off by its length. Rent it and watch it in one-hour chunks over a few nights. It’s riveting, and more so, it is simply important.
