Jarek and Caleb’s case was, unsurprisingly, the part of the episode I was least invested in. (One of the reasons I like the Teresa/Jarek banter scenes so much is that there’s never any sexual tension to them they’re just two former partners who are now on different political footing, even if he often forgets that.) I’d like to think that this is really just about the superintendent dropping her guard and letting somebody else replace Antonio (who was her protege but never her love interest), because that’s more interesting and less predictable. It’s an unfortunate fact that the default relationship between any attractive male/female pairing on television ultimately leads to romance (see Isaac and Vonda, for instance), and there were definite moments when Teresa and Ray seemed to be on the verge of flirting. I liked all of that stuff, as well as Teresa getting to know her new driver Ray, though I’ll be curious to see where the show intends to go with that. I don’t know that it entirely sold me on why a Chicago heat wave is so much worse than what hits, say, New York in early August, but it came close at times, and the vignette-driven approach to much of the episode allowed us to get a better sense of how the police department functions on a day like this, how Isaac and Vonda get along (and why Vonda is suddenly willing to make Isaac more than her partner), what Gibbons does when he’s not being evil, etc. Plotting – at least, the plotting of the cases Jarek and Caleb take over each week – remains the show’s biggest weak spot, so it helped that “Wild Onions” was much more interested in atmosphere than story. I like the show and its various pieces quite a bit, but where previous Shawn Ryan shows came out fully formed, “The Chicago Code” still seems to be figuring out its strengths and its weaknesses, its narrative style and its tone. That speaks, again, to the durability of what Bochco, Michael Kozoll, David Milch and company did back in the ’80s, but also to the fact that “The Chicago Code” still doesn’t entirely feel like it has its own identity yet. In many ways, “Wild Onions” felt like it could have been an episode of “Hill Street Blues,” with very minimal tweaking required to fit it to that show’s characters and fictional city (which was largely modeled on Chicago). The language of the modern cop drama – or, at least, the semi-serialized form of which “The Chicago Code” is an example – was essentially invented by NBC’s seminal ’80s show “Hill Street Blues.” Parts of that show haven’t aged terribly well, but if you go back and watch it, you can see how its DNA filtered into not only later Bochco shows like “NYPD Blue,” but “Homicide,” “The Shield” and even “The Wire.” A review of tonight’s “The Chicago Code” coming up just as soon as I’m 50 cents prettier…
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