Chicago looms large in the mythos of Americana, but that’s just it: too often it’s myth, not reality. Mayor Daley—the relatively good one, not the dead one—may have railed against the city’s continued depiction as a gangland capital, and attempted to erase it by lining the avenues with bike lanes and flower planters. But Chicagoans, with our flair for bluster and bullshit, are all too eager to give French tourists and the like what they want: a little tough talk and a tommy-gun pantomime. The same desire is writ large in the mass media, with the city serving as setting for movies like The Dark Knight. The real Chicago—best captured in Mike Royko’s motto “Ubi est mea?”—we keep to ourselves. Consider the Rahm Emanuel ballot debacle, for instance—no movie or TV show is capable of depicting such absurdity.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Debuting Monday on Channel 32, the Fox network’s new cop drama, The Chicago Code, is the latest to trade in the old mythos, updated for a new audience. Created by Shawn Ryan, who did the brutally entertaining and occasionally uncompromising Los Angeles-based cable cop show The Shield, The Chicago Code is more mainstream and formulaic in its conflicts, befitting its place on a broadcast network, and almost quaint in its conceits. Ryan grew up in downstate Rockford (don’t show me a map, anything not Chicago or its suburbs is downstate), and his show indulges in a sort of arm’s-length familiarity that bears little resemblance to what’s real. This is a Chicago where “the Irish mob” still rules the underworld, which hasn’t been true since the Saint Valentine’s Massacre and Bugs Moran—if then. A Chicagoan might expect a show like this to at least get the local usage right—it’s “the outfit,” not “the mob”—but that’s not the only thing it gets wrong. As in the Baltimore-based Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire, the cops here refer to themselves as “police,” without the the. Although the Irish do have their tentacles in politics, the main guy running government graft is a black alderman with a penchant for pink shirts and full Windsor knots named Ronin Gibbons, played by shaven-headed and lantern-jawed Delroy Lindo.
“He put me in this job because he expected me to be his puppet,” she says. Asked by her Hispanic right-hand man what option that leaves her, she replies, “Cut the strings.” Rebuffed by Gibbons when she seeks funds for a corruption task force, she resolves to form her own unofficial investigative unit.
That’s not the least of it. In the pilot’s opening action sequence, which follows quickly on Colvin’s “Chicago way” monologue to wake the napping, he talks down an edgy perp—in the middle of a high-speed car chase beneath the el tracks. “I know this guy,” he says to his driver as he cuts the guy off. “He won’t shoot me.”
Wysocki might frown on a little profanity, but he has no qualms about extensive police brutality. This might reflect a certain reality on the Chicago Police Department, but it also turns a blind eye to the ramifications of the Jon Burge scandal.
Series premiere Mon 2/7, 8 PM, on Channel 32
