From the moment con artist Max Mitchell (Vanessa Morgan) sets her sights on former detective Cole Ellis (Giacomo Gianniotti) in Wild Cards, the new Canadian police procedural premiering January 17 on The CW (and viewable on CBC Gem for my fellow Canadians), it’s clear we’re in for some good old-fashioned “will they or won’t they” procedural fun. There’s something almost nostalgic about a glossy dramedy starring pretty people that largely resolves everything in a tight 45 minutes, and instead relies on the captivating chemistry of its leads and the audience’s investment in each of them as people to move things forward. Fortunately for Wild Cards, the first two episodes of the series address this very well.
Wild Cards follows skilled con artist Max Mitchell, whose luck runs out when she’s caught posing as a wealthy woman in order to open her safe deposit box. She is taken to the precinct and handed over to the reluctant custody of former detective Cole Ellis, whose recent demotion to the Marine Unit remains a sore point. Ellis is upset about being responsible for booking Max while the arresting officers are engaged in a high-profile robbery investigation, but thanks to a tip from the extremely perceptive Max, Ellis becomes the first officer to get a decent lead on the case.
Creator: Michael KonyvesStars: Vanessa Morgan, Giacomo Gianniotti, Michael Xavier
From there, the two strike a deal with the police commissioner. The two will work together to assist the police department in whatever is asked of them for two months. If neither violates their probation, Ellis will be reinstated and the charges against Max will be dropped, and an unlikely partnership is born. Like Castle before it and Moonlighting before it, Wild Cards cases are solved using Ellis' procedural knowledge and Max's out-of-the-box thinking. But as fun as it may be, it’s not their divergent approaches to solving crimes that will keep viewers coming back each week, but the chemistry between the leads, which is by far the strongest part of the show.
Truly interesting “will they get together” or “won’t they get together” dynamics on television are increasingly rare. There are relationships explicitly written to be romantic almost immediately, and then there are cases where the very idea of romance is seen as detrimental to the integrity of the story by those involved in making it happen. What makes this dynamic so compelling to watch is the possibility of romance — think Jake (Andy Samberg) and Amy (Melissa Fumero) on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, or Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and Booth (David Boreanaz) on Bones — without it being a foregone conclusion. Max and Ellis could be together. We want them to be. But the pursuit of a romantic relationship isn’t what drives them through the first two episodes.
This makes the show’s few “trophied” moments feel like they’re imbued with a lot more tension, including delightful banter, glances that last a little longer than they should to be strictly platonic, and one particularly delightful scene that seems ripped from a fake-dating romance that would immediately precede an italicized “oh” moment.
Max’s cheerful attitude means she’s friendly and banters with everyone she comes into contact with, and Ellis’s seriousness means he can’t see past the end of his own angst and ambition to realize the fair lady might be flirting with him. Their different personalities and differing approaches to solving crimes put them at odds, but that only causes very short-lived frustration. The incredible chemistry between Morgan and Gianniotti gives their characters a “sarcastic friends turned lovers” energy – meaning when the two decide to get together (more of a when, not an if), it will be with a satisfying outcome for those of us hungry for a good long-running television series.
Because our current prestige television landscape demands ever-higher stakes, it’s rare for shows to truly feel and remain light and small-scale. If you don’t tie into a larger on-screen universe, then you’re very quickly introducing massive stakes into a setting and characters who aren’t ready to take them on. The long-running procedurals that many of us remember growing up with survived for so long precisely because they kept the stakes appropriate to their characters. The characters grew and evolved within their own environments, and so the story grew as a results.
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