The first series of this gritty police drama from AMC set in Detroit, has been filling a hole since the final season of the producers’ smash hit Breaking Bad ended. Something American TV dramas, and especially HBO shows, have been doing well recently is complex heroes in tough urban environments. In The Sopranos, Tony Soprano was a charismatic, likeable, cold-blooded, money-grubbing killer. The Wire took TV and film audiences’ love of gangsters a step further, giving the kind of depth to ambivalent characters you can only achieve over several episodes and series.
So, perhaps it’s no surprise that the main character in Low Winter Sun is complex and deeply compromised. Detective Frank Agnew (Mark Strong) is trying his best to retain some integrity, but he’s a damaged product of his brutal surroundings. And as the first series progresses, Frank and his partner in crime Joe Geddes (Lennie James) only sink deeper into the mire. Frank’s a bit of a loner, and the gradual uncovering of his past and character worked well in some places, but seemed hurriedly cut together and jumpy in others. Joe’s slide from the innocent little black boy who went to a Catholic School and still lives with his mama, to the cynical, self-loathing veteran of innumerable cover-ups, was more believable.
Race plays a significant part. “Detroit is a black man’s city,” is repeated a few times during the first series. The mayor is a black woman. The majority of the Detroit Police Department are black. Frank and Joe’s partnership is a white- black working relationship fraught with all sorts of problems, not least the colleague they’ve murdered. But the city appears fairly ghettoised. A hinge on which the plot swings is how small time player Damon Callis (James Ransone) and his wife Maya (Sprague Grayden) get caught in the middle of two rival gangs, one white, one black. Whatever the power relations in the rest of society, on the street, race is a blunt weapon to bludgeon someone who doesn’t look like you over the head with.
The Detroit Police Department is up to its neck in corruption, with very few cops still interested in doing the right thing. A couple of secondary characters Dani Kahlil (Athena Karkanis) and Simon Boyd (David Costabile) are the only straight cops and provide a good counter-balance to the general murk. But Low Winter Sun is realistic about the little a few good cops can do to halt the moral, social and political decay of a grisly city sliding into the abyss. The very fabric of the city is rotting. Crumbling buildings in vast urban wastelands populated by gangs, alcoholics, prostitutes and vagrants, are a graphic indictment of a failed city. Before the first homesteaders turned up this was probably a beautiful piece of the world, well managed by the indigenous peoples that lived in the area. Now it’s a shithole for which the apocalypse could not come too soon.
Words> Luke Roberts
The first Series of Low Winter Sun is released on DVD and Blu-Ray on 28 October.
