Entertainment
This Unforgiving Legal Drama We All Unfairly Slept on Is Finally Free To Watch
It may come as a surprise to some that the city of Chicago is not the capital of Illinois — that honor goes to Springfield — but, in the eyes of many, it is the infamous capital of America’s segregation, with stark contrasts found between race and economics in areas throughout the city, a side that is often represented inaccurately on network television. Of the three powerhouse shows of NBC’s One Chicago franchise, for example, only Chicago P.D. showcases those disparities to any real degree, while the questionable actions of its lead, Hank Voight (Jason Beghe), are indicative of its ugly history of police corruption.
In fact, Chicago P.D. is one of only a handful of TV projects that address the unattractive reality of the city. The Chicago Code, a one-season crime drama on Fox in 2011, is one, a series about an unofficial special unit of the Chicago Police Department working to expose corruption. The other is 61st Street, a crime thriller series that is unforgiving in its realistic depiction of institutional racism, corruption, and a legal system that is unfairly stacked against Black people. And if you slept on it, as many did, now’s your chance to wake up and catch it for free on Tubi.
The Accidental Death of a Police Officer Turns a Young Black Man Into a Pawn on ’61st Street’
In the opening moments of 61st Street‘s pilot episode, public defender Franklin Roberts (Courtney B. Vance) is unable to prevent a judge from sending a destitute Black man, whose only crime was stealing baby supplies for his newborn, to prison. It sets the tone for the series, a Black lawyer fighting a battle against a legal system that is harshly, and unjustly, against Black people. His next case, however, is going to be much more difficult than a charge of petty theft.
High school track star Moses Johnson (Tosin Cole) is a good kid, one set to break free of his impoverished life and go to college on a scholarship. But the young Black man ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and when Officer Michael Rossi (Patrick Mulvey) is accidentally killed in a drug bust gone wrong, Rossi’s fellow officers Brannigan (Holt McCallany) and Logan (Mark O’Brien) pin the blame on Moses. Instead of going to college, he’s going to prison.
The tragedy isn’t just that Moses has been wrongly implicated in a crime he didn’t commit, but that he gets lost is how others seek to use his situation. Brannigan hopes to use the tragedy of a dead, white police officer to turn the tide of the growing anti-police discourse. Roberts sees the obvious frame job by the police as an opportunity to reform the system, a final chance to do something good before his cancer makes it impossible to do so. His wife, Martha (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), intends to use Moses’ wrongful incarceration in her pursuit of becoming Alderman, adding it as yet another tragic example of over-policing. And in prison, Moses is just another Black pawn in a game of numbers in the racially-charged jailhouse fights, recruited by his own imprisoned father.
’61st Street’ Balances Realism and Melodrama With an Exceptional Cast
61st Street doesn’t hold back in its damnation of a system designed to work against the Black community. Wiretapping, unscrupulous interrogations, torture both physical and psychological, evidence planting, and pitting family against one another are revealed as tools of the trade. And it creates a deep, inescapable reality where the cost of fighting for what is right is doing what is wrong. This is the case of Moses’ brother, Joshua (Bentley Green), who turns to selling drugs to try and raise money for Moses’ bail, set unreasonably high, and is pulled into that life — essentially making one false accusation the cause of two brothers lives being forever altered.
Moses is acquitted at the end of the first season — a stunning victory — but it doesn’t end the saga that began with Rossi’s death. There are no real winners on 61st Street, when even Roberts’ time as a hero in the Black community is shattered when he accepts Logan’s request to represent him against the Chicago Police Department. It’s an air of authenticity and realism that makes 61st Street stand out from its kin. But that drive to lean heavily into real-life racial injustices and issues is also detrimental, giving the series a heavy-handedness and melodramatic element that can be a lot to take in.
Still, the positives of 61st Street outweigh the negatives significantly, and that has much to do with its exceptional cast. Cole, as a young man trying to maintain a sense of honor and goodness in the face of overwhelming adversity, is perfect. Ellis-Taylor, too, is very good, as a woman who is doing her best to juggle her political ambitions with a need to be both a wife to a husband battling cancer and mother to an autistic son. O’Brien offers a complexity to the otherwise stock police characters, a good cop caught up in emotion that gradually comes to see the darkness in the heart of the CPD. Vance, of course, who is seemingly incapable of a bad performance, lights it up as a lawyer who seizes an opportunity to slay the dragon he’s fought for years.
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