The Chicago Code Silenced
By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on May 11, 2011 4:20PM
Well, that's it, Fox has canceled The Chicago Code, and we admit to having mixed feelings about it. While this site's initial review was a glowing one, this critic felt the earlier episodes relied too heavily on piling on hackneyed Chicago cliches. The first episode was particularly egregious in "establishing" itself as being based in our fair city through verbal and visual markers tourists would understand -- we were just waiting for someone to start shouting, "Bang! Bang! Al Capone! Michael Jordan!" -- when it should have been hooking viewers in with compelling storylines.
It took too many episodes for the more interesting characters to grow out of cop show stereotypes into full-bodied people we were actually interested in; Jason Clarke's force veteran tough cop Jarek Wysocki and Delroy Lindo's ominous yet charming Alderman Ronin Gibbons were both standouts in this regard that we could have used more of. Unfortunately they were hampered by Jennifer Beals as police superintendent Teresa Colvin -- whose drive we could never quite believe and whose shirts were unusually tight and never covered by body armor -- and the ridiculous attempt at a smoldering relationship between the police partner characters of Devin Kelley and Todd Williams.
We did appreciate the use of actual Chicago locations in the show, no matter how logistically or hilariously misplaced, since that at least gave the series the flavor of being set in our city despite its other faults. And even this critic admits that despite all the less believable aspects of the show, and perhaps built upon the sheer will of the central characters we did begin to believe in, we found ourselves growing hooked. This would imply, at least to us, that there was something worth exploring at the core of the series, and that thing may have surfaced more clearly had The Chicago Code been allowed to develop further.
In even sadder noise, both Glee and Bones have been renewed for new seasons on the network.