Stream It Or Skip It: ‘61st Street’ On AMC, Where A Veteran Public Defender Represents An Athlete Caught Up In Chicago Gang Wars And Police Corruption

If you peruse Peter Moffat’s IMDb, you’ll notice a bunch of shows where someone is either wrongly accused of a heinous crime, or shows someone caught up in terrible circumstances even though he or she is technically guilty of a crime. In his newest series, Moffat takes on the violence in Chicago and the racism that seems to permeate law enforcement there.

61ST STREET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A young sprinter gets in the starting blocks on a track. His coach yells “Go!” and he’s off, concentrating on his breathing.

The Gist: Moses Johnson (Tosin Cole) is a big-time track star who lives on the South Side of Chicago; he’s already got a scholarship to a top college, and his coach encourages him to take advantage of the opportunity by experiencing everything college has to offer, not just athletics.

Franklin Roberts (Courtney B. Vance), a veteran public defender, walks gingerly to the courthouse and has a lot of pain while he goes to the bathroom. He’ll find out later that day that his doctor needs to biopsy his prostate to see if he has cancer. Roberts comes home to his wife Martha (Aunjanue Ellis) and son David (Jarell Maximillian Sullivan) and wonders if he’s made any difference in his decades of being a PD. He’s getting close to hanging up the shingle and trying something else.

Detective Michael Rossi (Patrick Mulvey) gets some intel from his source in the Nation and a theory about how his gang is getting all the heat and their rivals in the Faction are getting none. It leads Rossi to wear a wire, on his own, to see what’s going in in his own squad. He starts by asking his boss, Lieutenant Brannigan (Holt McCallany) why he’s been passed over for sergeant once again. But Brannigan has a drug sting set up to round up Nation members, and Rossi reluctantly goes along, though he tells his partner Johnny Logan (Mark O’Brien), he has a “bottom drawer”, i.e. evidence against Brannigan and others.

Moses encounters his little brother Joshua (Bentley Green) being hassled on one of the Nation’s corners, and the gangster who was Rossi’s informant is the one who gets angriest at the “college boy” who thinks he and his brother are better than they are. The cops pull up on the corner and a melee ensues, leaving bodies and people in handcuffs. Moses runs, and Rossi chases him, but something happens when the cop corners the sprinter that sends both of their lives into different directions. Joshua is swept up in the raid, as well, and he’s faced with ratting out his brother or spending the rest of his life in prison.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? 61st Street has the feel of showrunner Peter Moffat’s other series where law enforcement is corrupt and the innocent (or the privileged guilty) find themselves accused. We’re thinking Your Honor, Criminal Justice, and The Night Of.

Our Take: To say that the first episode of 61st Street, which includes Michael B. Jordan in its roster of executive producers, isn’t particularly nuanced is an understatement. The episode is full of broad strokes, from Vance’s character of a PD who is jaded and principled all at once, to the fact that the racist and corrupt Chicago Police Department doesn’t seem to care about the facts of a case when the people they arrest are Black. There doesn’t seem to be any grey areas in the first episode, which can rankle a viewer who is looking for a bit more subtelty in their crime and punishment dramas.

But the pseudo-Law & Order tone of the first episode is countered by Vance, whose world-weary turn as Franklin Roberts will likely bring some of that needed nuance to 61st Street. The Roberts family knows the Johnsons, and when he inevitably gets assigned (or volunteers for) Moses’ case, he’ll be the one to explore those grey areas. Yes, in micro, Moses’ actions led to a police officer losing his life. But in the macro, the sting was the action of a corrupt force that was out to get a cop’s informant, and they busted anyone in the area who had dark skin. Can his actions be mitigated by the fact that he shouldn’t have been in that position to begin with?

Where we start to wonder if the show might go astray is with the character of Brannigan, who seems like your standard-grade racist cop. When he and his squad raid the apartment of Moses’ mother Martha (Andrene Ward-Hammond), he treats her like a criminal, and assumes that his kids are lying to her about gangbanging and dealing. Then they find something in the apartment that prompts him to take her in. Yes, it speaks to the institutional racism inherent in our law enforcement system, but not in a way that leaves anything up to discussion. Brannigan is a corrupt bigot, and that character seems to act as more of a cartoonish Big Bad than a real character.

So our enjoyment of the series will depend on how much Moffat leans on the corrupt cops or how much he leans on Vance’s exposure of that corruption. If it’s the latter, the broad strokes in the first episode can be forgiven. If it’s the former, then the show will likely become very tough to watch.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After his mother tells him over the phone to run instead of giving himself up, Moses jumps out of the Dumpster he was hiding in and runs into the darkness.

Sleeper Star: It’ll be interesting to see how Tosin Cole transforms Moses from a forward-looking student-athlete to a guy fight9ing for his life in prison.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Martha tells Brannigan to be careful with a statue of the Virgin Mary he picks up, Brannigan says, “You want me to be careful? One of my cops is dead in the street because your son is an animal.” Way to not be racist, Brannigan.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re giving a recommendation of 61st Street mostly for the performances of Vance and Ellis. But we’re definitely concerned that the show will lean too hard on things we’ve seen in this genre too many times already to say anything new.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.