Watched it all the way through. First season better then second and knocked a point off after seeing the second season. For the love of god make sure the captioning works. Just because you have computer attempt it does not mean the job is done.
This series will appeal to the fantasies of men (and women) who want the dream of a detective with
- lots of access to women/sex
-police or police adjacent but on the outs somehow
-takes physical knocks and proves himself physically.
I call this the dime store Sam Spade.
As Spades's Hammet said about the physicality of the Sam Spade character:
"Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not-or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague-want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client."
The modern ones (Bosch, this series, et) also add
-solves the cases where others fail..all others pale in comparison..
-family martyrs: rather than fight for half custody and commit to being a full parent, they know their priority is their job not their children, so they "give" the other parents almost all custody rights but play the victim as if the other parent has forced this on them. As it is they are late with their children or in this case bring their child to crime scenes etc.
People like who they like when it comes to detectives. Some don't like women detectives and denigrate them as "Nancy Drew". Otherss like the fantasy of the Sam Spade type like this one. It's personal.
What I think was the main weakness of this show was the somehow dated nature of it. I am not sure if it is the plots, the other characters or a mix of both but I got a whiff of the outlandish or perhaps "already done" here...e.g as an example the family with the four sisters all eccentrics. Hasn't that been done many many times? The side characters all seemed larger than life (the failed stand up comic, the timid author). It just felt like an older style. Still okay as escapism of course.
At first I was weirded out as others mentioned Malfoy from Harry Potter. Then of course I realized it was the father.
7 - glad I watched but wouldn't save a copy in my video library.
Now a six - second season a muddle of untidy stories and untidy and inconsistent personal life interactions.
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