‘I’m a cop. I’m a woman. I’m a gay woman,” says Abigail “Tommy” Thomas in her first speech as Los Angeles’ first female police chief. If she had a better speechwriter, she would have leaned forward and added: “Can you dig it?”
Because she is played by Edie Falco, we can dig it. The reserves of fondness Falco built up over decades playing a mobster’s wife in The Sopranos, a double-shifting single mother prison guard in Oz, and the eponymous Nurse Jackie can be spent here to save a show that hits the Alibi channel at, to put it mildly, this unpropitious moment.
In a year of the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, US policing has, among other things, an image problem. If anybody can make us root for even a fictional American police officer in 2020, it’s Falco; whether we should do is a different matter.
Tommy is in effect Cressida Dick’s blowhard sister with the jeopardy ramped up to the max. “If I fail,” she tells a colleague, “it’ll be another 20 years before they give another woman the job.” The mayor’s homophobic lackeys are already calling her Butch Cassidy, but not to her face. Tommy’s predecessor, Chief Leaky, was a buzz-cut sleaze given early retirement after sending dick pics to his chief of traffic and presiding over a department that ran a prostitution ring specialising in underage girls.
Tommy by contrast is two stock figures for the price of one. She is a woman taking out the patriarchy’s trash, plus a slab of New York ham with a side of attitude. She damns LA as a hick burg where you can’t get a decent bagel or pizza. So when she finds out that an officer hails from Long Island and has a trusted pizza guy, she promotes him to her personal detail.
Not that there is time for pizza on Tommy’s first day. There’s a riot going on in the aftermath of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers bungling the arrest of Maria De La Puerta, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, after staking out her 12-year-old daughter’s school. The Ice officers do not realise what Tommy quickly does: namely that the $5,000 paid into Maria’s bank account every month comes not from gangster drug money as the Ice muppets suppose, but from the under-characterised slimeball who sex-trafficked Maria from Mexico 12 years earlier and made her pregnant even though she was 15 at the time. “In my country,” says the aforementioned slimeball, “that is not uncommon.” Really? I would like to hear Mexico’s side of that story.
An otherwise sparkling script drowns in backstory. Tommy’s career was set back a decade ago by a superior officer whose nose she broke when he tried to rape her. He got done only for sexual harassment, while she couldn’t get a promotion for a decade. On the plus side she became a feminist icon, though, as she puts it: “I’d rather have the 10 years back.” She has an ex-husband and such a chronic work ethic that she alienated her daughter. The daughter, having marital problems with her beardy software engineer husband, nonetheless asks Mum to move in to provide emotional support. Which sounds like a terrible idea, albeit one rich with narrative possibilities.
In LA, Tommy struggles not just with corruption, bad bagels, misogyny and whatever that uniform is made of, but with getting old. She has a drink with a hot woman she meets in a lift. “I’m gonna have my second glass of wine in my pyjamas. Interested?” asks the woman. Tommy looks into the middle distance. “The sad truth is that I’m at the point in my life where I’d rather have the extra hour’s sleep.”
At such moments, Tommy could have become an adorable heroine for our times, but she blows it. In the first episode, she becomes white saviour to Maria, the kind of liberal narrative arc cop shows have been rolling out since Hill Street Blues. In 2020, this storyline should have turned in its badge and gun.
Instead, Chief Tommy goes rogue, wades into a riot and puts Maria in a cell to protect her from Ice’s investigation. Then she tells social services that Maria’s daughter Madison will be staying at Tommy’s daughter’s place until the case is resolved. You would think there are laws stopping such an obvious conflict of interest, but on TV, laws get trumped by narrative demands, no matter how silly.
The result is that Tommy deconstructs itself. Its liberating premise of a city so diverse it can have a lesbian police chief is undone by the white hero who saves a person of colour only by infantilising them. Which is one of the insidious ways racism works. Despite Edie Falco, Tommy is more problem than solution.
