John Ridley's 'American Crime' on ABC

Of course, TV with an intelligent recognition that actual crime has far-reaching and devastating effects did exist before 2010. Homicide comes to mind, as does NYPD Blue, but even as we feel compelled to possess more guns per capita than any nation on Earth, we still seem to need TV crime dramas that deal with hideous crime as briskly as John Wayne or Perry Mason could. (That’s if the Duke could wrap things up more quickly than he did in his films; Perry set the standard.)

Lately, however, television has risen to the level of a good novel or quality, two-hour film to show the American mass audience that real crime doesn’t work that way.

Slow dance of death

In 2011, The Killing’s Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman, as detectives Sarah Linden and Stephen Holder, dragged us all out into the Seattle rain to reveal what a teenaged girl’s body in a sunken car actually does to everybody involved: The one case unfolded over the course of two seasons. Justified, the series based on the late work of Elmore Leonard, has shown us what a dogged, trigger-happy modern U.S. marshal has to deal with in pursuit of a sharp sociopath. The dance of death by Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins, as Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder, has been something to watch. As Ellen Gray reported, Leonard even admitted before his death in 2013 that the series “got the characters better than I put them on paper.”

Now, somewhat astonishingly, regular network TV has conjured up a series to challenge these two cable productions: ABC’s American Crime may be the best thing the network has produced since the early days of their Wide World of Sports. This program is six episodes in, and it deserves a wider audience.

Whereas the Rosie Larsen seasons of The Killing focus sharply on investigating detectives and the family members of the crime victim, American Crime focuses on the surviving members of an apparent home-invasion murder and rape and, daringly, the criminals involved and their families and friends.

Love/hate characters

Timothy Hutton plays Russ, the father of a murdered Iraq veteran and father-in-law of his son’s barely surviving wife; he is a reformed gambler who more or less stumbles into the horror of his son’s death. In contrast, his ex-wife, Barb (Felicity Huffman), is a miracle of pinpoint anger and possible delusion. She is sure her son and his wife were targeted, as whites, in a hate crime. At this point in the drama’s progression, Huffman is stealing the show, pulling off a trick belonging in some “best of” category: She manages to make a grieving mother borderline detestable.

The criminals and criminal facilitators get similar attention: Tony, a second-generation Mexican-American teen (Johnny Ortiz); Hector, an apparently illegal Mexican immigrant (Richard Cabral); and an interracial meth-head couple, Carter and Aubry (Elvis Nolasco and Caitlin Gerard). All are transformed by the crime, and all these actors are almost ridiculously convincing as nuanced characters. As the meth-heads, for example, Nolasco and Gerard are alternately uncomfortably pathetic (mooning over pictures ripped from magazines while high) and weirdly sympathetic (deeply in love but unlikely to survive). Better than serviceable is Benito Martinez as Tony’s frustrated father, a hardworking body-shop owner.

Midway through a season, it’s hard to believe that the same network that produces the awful cop-wannabe nonsense of Castle put even a finger on this show. But they did.

And “they” is the operative pronoun: The series is the result of the work of writer-director John Ridley and no fewer than three other directors and five other writers.

Above right: Nolasco and Gerard (Photo by Bill Matlock/ABC - © 2015)