THE RED LINE (excellent CBS mini-series)

[samhexum]

Noah Wylie's performance is Emmy-worthy

 

A simple trip to a grocery store sets in motion a chain of tragic events in “The Red Line,” a limited series Sundays on CBS.

 

Noah Wyle (“ER”) stars as Daniel Calder, a teacher whose husband, Harrison (Corey Reynolds), an African American doctor, is picking up milk after a long shift at the Chicago hospital where he works when a holdup takes place.

 

After the thief leaves, Harrison steps forward to minister to the owner’s head wounds. A lone white cop, responding to a 911 call, enters the store and shoots Harrison twice in the back, mistaking him for the thief.

 

Six months later, Calder is trying to function at his job teaching AP history at a local high school while raising his adopted teenage daughter, Jira (Aliyah Royale), also African American. He’s doing a bad job of holding it together. “This is thrust upon Daniel and he’s not ready,” says Wyle, 47. “He has to put on a brave face but internally he’s crumbling. His grief has to take second place. He has to figure out a way to reach somebody and admits he has lost control. And he’s selfish and not above hurting people That’s the part I like. He’s not a perpetual victim. At the same time he’s an antagonist.”

 

First developed as a play by executive producers Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss, “The Red Line” — so named after the Chicago metro line — shows how one family’s grief reverberates through Chicago’s shaky sociopolitical structure. Calder wants Paul Evans (Noel Fisher), the cop who killed his partner, to lose his badge and hires an attorney. Feeling she can’t express what she’s going through as a black child who has lost her black father, Jira reaches out to her birth mother, Tia Young (Emayatzy Corinealdi), who’s risen far above the circumstances that found her pregnant at age 15: She’s running for public office and has her own family.

 

For Wyle, it’s his Regina King moment: a mature, robust role that reminds your peers how good you really are. “I was incredibly moved by it. The scripts avoided clichés and went for a deeper sense of inclusion,” he says. “I looked at the project more like a personal odyssey than the next big career decision. I know they went through a few actors before they came to me.”

 

Aware that we live in an age where art must serve politics, Parrish and Weiss admit they first offered the part to the nation’s most public gay actors. “Noah knows that. He knows we did our due diligence,” Weiss says. Availability was the problem. “Most of the actors were in [the 2018 Broadway production] of ‘The Boys in the Band,’ ” Parrish adds. The matter seemed settled once the cast gathered at the first table read and Wyle left the writers in tears. That’s when Weiss said to herself, “Oh, it was always supposed to be him.”

 

If there’s any controversy in “The Red Line” it will be the series’ negative portrayal of the white cops in the Chicago police department, which is in line with other Hollywood portrayals of law enforcement personnel.

 

But Parrish defends her characterization of the policemen in “The Red Line.”

 

“It was very important to not portray the cops as just one thing,” says Parrish. “It was important that Paul not be a sociopath blindly executing people. Or a perfectly good person making a mistake. The truth lies in the ambiguous middle.”

 

“It’s really easy forget how many dedicated men and women risk their lives every day,” Wyle says. “I think Erica and Caitlin did a good job of showing the diversity of the police department. I think it’s honest.”

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A real-life event had a profound effect on the premise of the CBS limited series “The Red Line.”

 

The eight-episode series picks up almost immediately after the fictional police shooting death of a gay black doctor, Harrison Brennan (Corey Reynolds) and follows three storylines: his husband Daniel (Noah Wyle) and their adopted daughter Jira (Aliyah Royale); Officer Paul Evans (Noel Fisher), his brother (Michael Patrick Thornton) and his partner Vic (Elizabeth Laidlaw); and Chicago alderman candidate Tia Young, Jira’s birth mother (Emayatzy Corinealdi).

 

The program pulls from the headlines, a combination of similar cases across the country. The aftermath of the actual shooting death of a black teenager by a Chicago cop changed history, and changed the script.

 

In 2014, Laquan McDonald was fatally shot by Officer Jason Van Dyke. Initially, Van Dyke was not charged because he claimed McDonald, who was 17, had been behaving erratically, had a small knife and was a threat to the officer.

 

There was dashcam video of the shooting, but it took a judge’s order 13 months later to get the city to release it. The video showed McDonald veering away from officers, contradicting Van Dyke’s account that he had lunged at him with a knife.

 

In October 2018, a jury found Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm — one count for each bullet fired at McDonald. He became the first Chicago cop in decades to be convicted of murder for an on-duty shooting.

 

McDonald was convicted during the filming for “The Red Line”; his sentencing didn’t change the story or the idea that officers are held to a different standard, but it meant precedence for their fictional officer to face repercussions for his actions.

 

Showrunners Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss, who have worked together for more than 15 years, created the series from their 2011 play “A Twist of Water,” which debuted at a Chicago theater before moving to off-Broadway.

 

“We returned to those characters and that story that we loved so much,” Weiss told the Daily News. “The cultural conversation and sociopolitical conversation was different between 2011 and 2015 when we wrote the pilot and even more in 2019.”

 

Parrish and Weiss, both white, built diversity into the writers’ room and crew.

 

“From moment one, we made it a priority to listen,” Parrish told The News. “We care more about getting the show right than either of us being right.”

 

In the first two episodes provided to critics, “The Red Line” is a heartbreaking reminder that a story doesn’t end when an Emergency Room doctor declares time of death or a trial ends. Family members are left reeling; police officers struggle to move on.

 

“I was so moved by the immensity of the tragedy,” Wyle, returning to network TV for the first time since “ER,” told The News. “I’m really attracted to characters who go along almost on autopilot and everything that defines them…is stripped away. Where does that leave them?”

 

“The Red Line” looks at what happens next.

 

Wyle’s character Daniel grapples with his emotions while dealing with his daughter’s new reality, while Jira (Royale), who grew up with two fathers in a mixed-race household, is looking for something to hold onto. She picks her birth mother.

 

“She’s trying so hard to get Daniel to understand,” Royale, a relative newcomer to TV, told The News. “She knows her upbringing and she’s thankful for it, but clearly there’s this whole universe she never knew about. She needs someone who looks like her, a woman who looks like her, to get a a better understanding of herself, a better comprehension of what happened to Harrison.”

 

And for Paul Evans, the white officer who shot and killed the innocent black man, a young cop searches for the truth of that night: colleagues, including his partner, have repeatedly told him he did everything right. But that’s not what happened.

 

“It exists in the gray,” Fisher, known best for his role on “Shameless,” told The News. “From the moment that he understands what happens, he’s utterly devastated and questioning himself from that point on.”

 

“The Red Line” is more questions than answers, more doubt than faith. The show doesn’t want you to pick a side or a villain, to blame the white cop for shooting or the black man for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

“It’s so easy to ascribe a value judgement to something that you’re hearing the top level detail to,” Wyle told The News. “What we do and why we do things is infinitely more than that.”

 

 

Edited May 17, 2019 by samhexum

[KeepItReal]

I enjoyed the first episode - enough to make me look forward to the 2nd. Thanks for pointing us to it!