Three Reasons to Cast A Comic Actor to Play Someone in Your Crime Procedural Who Is Definitely NOT a Cop
The state murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 led a lot of people to take stock of their lives and values. Protests were attended; decisions about charitable giving were revised; media diets were re-evaluated. Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk wrote an essay that elucidated the problem: “Cops Are Always the Main Characters.”
Some shows’ producers met the moment head-on, taking accountability for their part in promoting copaganda. Brooklyn Nine-Nine, for example, famously scrapped a whole season’s worth of scripts and wrote life-changing self-reflection by its characters into what ended up being its final season: Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz) retired from the NYPD to become a private detective working with clients who’d been victimized by corrupt policing, while Holt (Andre Braugher) and Santiago (Melissa Fumero) devised a plan to defund their department.
Other shows, like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, only committed to portray its cops having a harder time “trying to do the right thing” and understanding “why it’s hard for them.” By the time NBC revived Law & Order, the show from which SVU had spun off, less than two years had passed, but things weren’t just back to normal. They were, in fact, worse, with new detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) getting copious screen time to complain about witnesses knowing their rights and his risk of termination should he rough up a Black suspect, presumably because in the show’s fantasy version of New York City, qualified immunity doesn’t exist.
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The vast majority of Law & Order fans, during its first 20 seasons, might not have balked at prosecutorial overreaches by Sam Waterston’s Jack McCoy, despite their frequency; in the 2020s, such breaches read less as tough but situationally necessary choices, and more like proof of that the entire carceral system is irredeemably compromised — and while we may agree on that in real life, seeing it play out on TV can’t help causing some queasiness.
Meanwhile, shows about defense attorneys fell off the schedule. So Help Me Todd, revolving around a lawyer and her investigator son, only made it two seasons; For Life, about a wrongfully convicted man who becomes a lawyer to represent other clients in the same position, also hung on for just two seasons; Law & Order: For the Defense never made it to air, axed in favor of Law & Order: Organized Crime, featuring Chris Meloni’s Eliot Stabler, by far the franchise’s angriest and most violent detective.
So: no one wants to be complicit in perpetuating biased (or outright fantastical) portrayals of the American legal system. But we may still want to watch shows where fictional crimes get solved, because mysteries are fun to untangle and getting a resolution after 41 minutes is satisfying. Creators get this — it’s no accident that TV procedurals have existed just about as long as TV itself — which is why several new and returning shows have tweaked the format juuuuuuust a bit.
Here are three benefits of building a legal procedural around a character who’s not a cop, and casting a comic actor to play her…
Warning: Contains spoilers about the series premiere of Matlock (2024).
She Can Keep It Light, Even When She’s Trying to Help Solve a Major Crime
In High Potential, Kaitlin Olson — of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Hacks fame — plays Morgan. She’s a nighttime cleaner at an LAPD precinct, favoring a job where she doesn’t have to interact with anyone because the “high potential” of the series title refers to her intellectual capacity: Morgan has an astronomical IQ, a photographic memory and superior cognition, so dealing with people of average intelligence is extremely frustrating for her.
When, in the series premiere, Morgan gets caught on camera rearranging evidence in an active murder case to correct detectives’ incorrect assumptions, she gets hauled in and threatened with prosecution for evidence tampering, so she’s forced to huff and eye-roll her way through an evidence-based explanation for why she reached the conclusions she did, then shrug, “I have some expired ham to fry up before tomorrow, so if you’ll excuse me….”
Later, she seizes on claims by a person of interest that at the time of the murder, he was in Fontana: Morgan tells detectives that’s the Kentucky of California, and that the only reason to go there is to get hepatitis at a water park or attend a budget bachelorette party. Morgan has an interest, on a human level, in solving the crime — not to mention that she knows for a fact the detectives won’t figure things out as fast as she can — but since she’s doing it as a civilian, she can treat it as a puzzle, not as a mission requiring her to get way too aggressive about it like TV cops so often do.
Then there’s Elsbeth (Carrie Preston). Originally, she was a quirky defense attorney as a recurring guest star on The Good Wife and its spin-off, The Good Fight; but on her namesake show — soon premiering its second season — she’s been assigned by the Justice Department to monitor the NYPD under a consent decree, meaning that in the universe of the show, the cops are understood from the start to be unethical enough for the federal government to have intervened. In both jobs, Elsbeth’s seemingly spacy manner disarms the people she meets, luring them into the misapprehension that they can let their guard down around her, or just trust that their deceptions are fooling her.
Elsbeth, her current show is a Columbo-esque howdunnit, so that the audience knows all along who the perp is, and the pleasure lies in watching Elsbeth figure it out. Also as on Columbo, the murderers are all rich jerks who richly deserve the comeuppance they’re too arrogant to think is coming. Even though Elsbeth’s previous career didn’t require her to visit many crime scenes, she’s perfectly comfortable not just being proximate to a violently murdered corpse, but free-associating accidentally comical lines like, “It seemed like such a beautiful wedding. Mine was nothing like this. It had way more pleated pants and mosquitoes.” Preston, a veteran of feature romcoms like My Best Friend’s Wedding and the dark TNT comedy Claws, is the twinkling fairy who makes Elsbeth the cozy mystery it is.
Matlock (2024) is the story of Madeline Matlock (Kathy Bates), a long-retired lawyer returning to the workforce after more than 30 years. Why? She’ll readily tell you, or anyone, in cheerfully self-deprecating detail. Her husband died! He was a gambler and left her in debt! They were together for 38 years, during which time he didn’t learn the geography of her most intimate parts, and she never told him he’d never satisfied her sexually! She’s raising her grandson, who hates her! Like Elsbeth, Matty’s apparently compulsive oversharing makes her kinder colleagues at Jacobson Moore, the law firm where she talks her way into a two-week tryout, feel protective toward her, even when she’s seemingly screwing up the first case she’s assigned by contradicting a younger lawyer who claims they can subpoena a reluctant witness.
But — and here comes the twist! — Matty’s whole backstory is a put-on. In reality, she’s Madeline Kingston, a lawyer so successful she has a limousine and driver on call and lives in a sprawling estate with her still-alive and presumably sexually competent husband Edwin (Sam Anderson). The one detail of her biography that’s true: She’s raising her (loving) grandson Alfie (Aaron D. Harris) because he’s been orphaned by his mother’s opioid-overdose death; Matty’s infiltrating Jacobson Moore because one of the lawyers there is culpable for hiding documents that could have interrupted the opioid crisis much sooner, and she’s planning to find out which.
Kathy Bates can obviously deliver jokes, including at her own character’s expense; using them to create her hard-luck cover story brilliantly disguises her power and acuity, not that anyone she works with would probably suspect she possessed them anyway. As she explains when she initially interrupts a Jacobson staff meeting, older women are invisible.
She Can Credibly Shit-Talk the Institutions She’s Reluctantly Working In, or Near
Regarding the shows depicted up top, three of these things belong together, and one of these things is doing its own thing. That one is Poker Face, another howdunnit starring Natasha Lyonne as Charlie. Initially a casino cocktail server with an unusual talent for telling when someone’s not telling the truth, Charlie embarks on a journey around the country after a lie-detecting sting ends in the suicide of her casino owner’s son; Charlie doesn’t bother waiting to tell the police her story, since Sterling Jr. (Adrien Brody) had already told her he has the local cops on retainer, and she has no reason to disbelieve it, irrespective of her gift.
Charlie does send evidence of criminal activity to relevant law enforcement agencies (and to Oprah Winfrey), but anonymously. Even as she continues stumbling, unluckily, into murders everywhere she ends up, tips are as far as she’ll go, and we know why: She’s run afoul of some very powerful, very connected people, and she’s surely right not to trust that direct contact with the authorities will go well for someone like her. It’s safer for her to make herself a wisecracking Robin Hood and/or Incredible Hulk of crime investigation.
Morgan ends the first episode of High Potential accepting a job as a consultant for the LAPD in exchange for her supervisor reopening a case: Fifteen years earlier, Roman, the father of her eldest daughter Ava (Amirah J), disappeared, and though the cops assumed he left town or met a violent end connected to his activities as a graffiti artist, Morgan is sure he wouldn’t have left his family. But even though she has a vested interest in remaining connected to the department, she’s also someone who’s had police contact — when she gets detained in the first episode, her ex-husband Ludo (Taran Killam) lets us know it’s not the first time her big talk has gotten her into legal trouble — so she has a natural instinct for putting witnesses and suspects at ease in what could otherwise be touchy situations.
For instance, in the second episode, she and her new partner Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) stop by the body shop where the latest victim worked. Karadec comes in with coppish aggression, and since this is a business that hires ex-convicts, none of the now-comatose patient’s friends wants to talk to him. Morgan convinces them to talk to her by saying that if they don’t, the cops will just waste time talking to people like them who didn’t do anything wrong — and since they know, as she does, that police make lazy and often incorrect assumptions in order to clear cases, it works. Having institutional knowledge of policing from the other side makes Morgan more effective than Karadec.
As for Elsbeth, she has no vanity or illusions about the job that’s been her life’s work. When Detective Smullen (Danny Mastrogiorgio) snits at her on a case that “this is why people don’t like lawyers,” she chirps, “Really? I thought it was the frivolous lawsuits and overbilling.”
No one knows more of those jokes than an attorney, but nice try, Detective.
She Can Pull Off Quirky Outfits So That Press Pics from Your Show Make It Look Fun
What cop have you ever seen that dresses with this much flair instead of black microfiber dress pants? Cops can’t even see pink, and if you tried to put a patchwork faux fur on them, they’d probably shoot it. When someone works with cops but isn’t cop, you should see them coming from miles away, like a fuchsia tornado.
