In small but meaningful ways, 'NCIS: New Orleans' offered a model of how to retrofit an old-school police procedural into something more reform-minded. Writes kvanaren: 'It did not reinvent the wheel, but it tweaked it.'
Scott Bakula as Dwayne Pride. Photo: CBS Police procedurals are stasis machines. They are designed to run in place. Oh, sure, they look like they’re moving. Crime after crime is introduced and solved; cast members come and go. At the core, though, each episode is a closed loop, designed to end roughly in the same place it began. It’s a genre built to resist change.
For most of its run, NOLA’s protagonist, with the fantastic TV name Dwayne Pride , has been a familiar, plays-outside-the-rules kind of cop, often making unilateral decisions about when to ignore the law in favor of what he sees as justice. In its seventh season, NOLA began to incorporate stories more explicitly skeptical of Pride’s tactics and wove them together with broader observations about the challenge of life in New Orleans for anyone without his cultural advantages.
Early in its final season, NCIS: New Orleans aired a scene that signaled its protagonist had changed. In it, Pride challenges one of his colleagues — a retired police superintendent named Holland . Earlier in the episode, Holland blew up at a young Black Lives Matter activist in a meeting after she insisted the New Orleans police department is full of discrimination, corruption, and brutality. Holland is furious about the confrontation, but Pride pushes back.
It’s a fair point. Structure is a key reason why change is so hard in this genre. A good procedural episode has to introduce a new crime, a new victim, a new set of suspects, and a new perpetrator in every episode. A character introduction alone can eat up multiple minutes of an episode’s run time: about 42 minutes without commercials.
On one hand, this is an obvious opportunity for Pride to do some politically de rigueur soul-searching. But Bakula plays it well, leaning into Pride’s self-recrimination and -doubt; he’s more vibrant here than in the endless procession of door-busting gun battles. It’s also markedly different from the way Pride was depicted during Kern’s era running the show.
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