New Amsterdam
It’s quite rare that Mrs Shears and I will make a point of watching the first episode of some new TV show, seeing as all series’, without exception these days, are insipid and braindead affairs. The last shows we watched in first run were: every season of Seinfeld, a few seasons of Malcolm in the Middle, and about one-point-three seasons of Monk, until we realized that show was bound and determined to remain a one-note song.
We thought this New Amsterdam might be interesting and, by and large, it was more interesting than not.
Stop here to avoid spoilers.
Start with the bad: Clichés are hard to avoid, especially, apparently, on TV crime dramas. You had your three glaring cliché characters dragging the whole thing down: The Belligerent Colleague, the Unwelcome Woman Police Partner and the Corrupt Rich Guy. You’ve seen them many times before – that’s why they’re clichéd – so no need to belabor it. It’s almost like the creators (and this would include show runners, writers, directors and meddling network suits) feel they need to add these sorts of signposts or their audience will get disoriented, forget they’re watching TV and wander aimlessly out of the room.
Our hero, John Amsterdam, is given the gift of immortality by an Indian shaman woman for saving her life…400 years ago. He’s a Dutch soldier trying to keep his fellow blood thirsty Europeans from slaughtering the Indian women. (Kill the men, no problem.) Ostensibly this is all happening in or around Manhattan Island before the trinkets-for-skyscrapers deal was inked. Amsterdam is repaid with a sharp sword through the gullet.
Overall the show found interesting ways to dab history and made-up history into the script, some of it purely throwaway and some worked into the plot. And the episode ended with a cool time-lapse animation of Times Square morphing from the old days to present.
The treatment of tobacco was surprisingly equitable. It’s unusual enough to have tobacco present at all, but here it appears to have magical restorative powers; the shaman woman grants John his curse/blessing by blowing smoke from a pipe into his mouth, and by waving what can only be a bouquet of smoldering tobacco leaves over his body.
Later though, Unwelcome Woman Police Partner slams him with the obligatory “You have a death wish.” while he’s drawing nicely on a hookah. A hookah! The creators here obviously went out of their way to moderate any knee-jerk smoking stigma and found an exotic and unfamilar nicotine delivery system for their hero. To have John Amsterdam smoke a cigarette or a cigar might not only get them in trouble with the the network tobacco censors, but narrative short-hand conventions over the last decade or two have evolved so that smoking is as much a signal of the Bad Guy as black hats might have been in the old Westerns. A Bad Guy – and it usually is a guy, a white guy - can easily be identified in modern movies and TV shows because he smokes. (Remember that guy who smoked in the movie Deep Blue Sea? You knew that brainy shark was going to eat that guy.) Then again how often do you see a hookah on a network TV show?
The tone of the show was tolerably tongue-in-cheek, with Amsterdam occasionally referring to his presence at some long-ago historical event or other, and his companions looking at him like he’s just a little off, rather than completely nuts. Hopefully they’ll refine this, keep it low-key, instead of dropping it.
But we don’t hold out too much hope that the Indian shaman’s magical medicinal plant will stick around for too many more episodes. Complaints from the life-style commissars have probably already begun to flow in.
Second episode tomorrow night. It was good enough to have us leaning toward watching that one too.
New Amsterdam, TV, hookah, tobacco | bshears March 6, 2008
