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In TV news, I started watching The Guardian. Because Simon Baker is cute, and for previously stated reasons, I can't bring myself to watch any more of The Mentalist.
The premise of The Guardian is that Baker is a spoiled rich lawyer who was busted on drug charges and has to do community service providing legal aid to abused children. Cue twee heartwarming shmaltz, you'd think.
But--I've only watched a handful of episodes so far and in pretty much every one, he fails. He pulls out all the stops, performs genius heroic legal theatrics, and he still fails. The girl runs away with her abuser, or the kid still gets taken away from his loving stepfather and put in an awful group home, or the kid dies, or the kid is so traumatized that nothing Baker does actually makes any difference.
And it's not the perverse voyeurism of Law & Order:SVU, where the whole point is to shock and horrify the main characters so that you can end the episode with ominous music and a slow pan away from their gaping faces. Nor does it really seem to be about him Learning A Lesson, though that's clearly the underlying arc of the show.
It's more like the constant grind of trying hard and being disappointed is what this kind of work is about. And at least so far, Baker isn't throwing himself at these cases because he's looking for redemption or becoming a better person, but because he is a stubborn asshole, and you give him a bureaucratic mess of a broken system and he's going to try to prove that he can fix it. Even though he can't.
He's also...not a nice character. I mean, his character is a flaming douchebag in Mentalist, but you're clearly meant to see his assholery in that show as him "not taking any crap" and "cutting through the red tape" or some nonsense. In this show, there's an episode whose entire plot is that he slept with a sixteen-year-old. Not too many shows would do that to a main character.
So I'm left wondering how this show possibly stayed on the air for an entire season, let alone several. It so skillfully eschews all of the cheesy, tearjerker moments the premise seems designed for. I haven't decided if I like it yet, but...at least it's something different.
The premise of The Guardian is that Baker is a spoiled rich lawyer who was busted on drug charges and has to do community service providing legal aid to abused children. Cue twee heartwarming shmaltz, you'd think.
But--I've only watched a handful of episodes so far and in pretty much every one, he fails. He pulls out all the stops, performs genius heroic legal theatrics, and he still fails. The girl runs away with her abuser, or the kid still gets taken away from his loving stepfather and put in an awful group home, or the kid dies, or the kid is so traumatized that nothing Baker does actually makes any difference.
And it's not the perverse voyeurism of Law & Order:SVU, where the whole point is to shock and horrify the main characters so that you can end the episode with ominous music and a slow pan away from their gaping faces. Nor does it really seem to be about him Learning A Lesson, though that's clearly the underlying arc of the show.
It's more like the constant grind of trying hard and being disappointed is what this kind of work is about. And at least so far, Baker isn't throwing himself at these cases because he's looking for redemption or becoming a better person, but because he is a stubborn asshole, and you give him a bureaucratic mess of a broken system and he's going to try to prove that he can fix it. Even though he can't.
He's also...not a nice character. I mean, his character is a flaming douchebag in Mentalist, but you're clearly meant to see his assholery in that show as him "not taking any crap" and "cutting through the red tape" or some nonsense. In this show, there's an episode whose entire plot is that he slept with a sixteen-year-old. Not too many shows would do that to a main character.
So I'm left wondering how this show possibly stayed on the air for an entire season, let alone several. It so skillfully eschews all of the cheesy, tearjerker moments the premise seems designed for. I haven't decided if I like it yet, but...at least it's something different.
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