Remote Patrol: Are American Crime and Secrets and Lies arresting TV?
How to Get Away with Murder may be about to close its first season, but ABC has two more mysteries ready to roll out: Secrets and Lies (debuting Sunday, March 1) and American Crime (taking over HTGAWM's post-Scandal Thursday slot on March 4). While one of them is genuinely captivating, the other is just criminally awful.
Created by John Ridley - the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave - American Crime follows the fallout after a white man is murdered during a home invasion in sleepy Modesto, California. When three of the four suspects taken into custody for the case are minorities, racial and ethnic tensions boil over in the town.
More than just a portrait of a fractured community, however, American Crime delves deeply into the families affected by this horrific act. The victim's divorced parents, devastatingly well-played by Desperate Housewives' Felicity Huffman and Ordinary People's Timothy Hutton, are forced to confront each other - and their own failings.
Huffman's character is a thinly-veiled racist (she often refers to African-Americans, Muslims and Latino immigrants as "those people") who hires a passionate victims-rights advocate (the always-superb Lili Taylor) to bring hate-crime charges against the assailants. Hutton plays a recovered-gambling addict who's still wracked with guilt over having destroyed his family and is desperately seeking redemption.
Just as strong are Penelope Ann Miller (Men of a Certain Age) and W Earl Brown (Deadwood) as the parents of the victim's wife, who was assaulted during the attack and lies in a coma. When details of their daughter's sordid sex life emerge, their pain feels palpable, with Brown giving a searingly unvarnished performance.
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But American Crime's estimable ensemble doesn't end there: The Shield's Benito Martinez impresses as one of the accessories to the murder's self-hating Latino father, and Southland's Regina King brings her usual fierce presence as the Muslim sister of the alleged killer, a meth-head (Elvis Nolasco, in a breakout star turn).
Ridley's writing simmers with intelligence, and he's not afraid to pen provocative dialogue: "If you had three whites who went into a black's house and did this, you'd have all these black leaders on Anderson Cooper talking about how it's a hate crime… but hate crimes can't happen to white people?" Huffman's character rants.
It's all played on a simmeringly realistic level; fans of Shonda Rhimes's ludicrously heightened melodramas may find Ridley's grittiness a bracing contrast, but I hope they'll stick with the show. I've seen four of its 11 episodes - and if it returns next season, it'll be with entirely new characters, although some of the same cast may be back in new roles - and it just keeps getting smarter and stronger every week.
Secrets and Lies, on the other hand, skims along the surface of a storyline that makes the similar (and wildly overrated) Gone Girl seem deep. After his triumphant turn as a Julian Assange-like hacker in the final season of Damages, Ryan Phillippe is back at his emotionally constipated worst as a suburban dad who's inexplicably tagged by the media as a murderer after he discovers a boy's body while jogging in the woods.
A long way from her Oscar-nominated Cape Fear days, Juliette Lewis laughably overplays the role of a Columbo-like detective determined to nail Phillippe, and Man Up's Dan Fogler (aka the poor man's Jack Black) tries and fails to bring intentional comic relief as his party-hearty buddy who provides him with a shaky alibi.
Only when exec producer Timothy Busfield (thirtysomething) turns up in episode two as a sleazy defense lawyer does this DOA whodunit show any signs of life, and even he's saddled with clichéd lines like, "She's all over you like flies on crap!"
With any luck, the same won't be said of viewers who tune in to crap like Secrets and Lies.
Bruce Fretts is a veteran of both Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide Magazine, where he penned the wildly popular 'Cheers & Jeers' column for ten years.
