TV Diary (Baltimore Edition)
1. Roc
I remember when I was like 10 years old and my brother and I would go visit our dad in Baltimore and sometimes watch Roc with him. Roc took place in producer/star Charles S. Dutton's native Bmore (although most of it was shot a soundstage somewhere else, there were a fair amount of external shots of real Baltimore blocks), and ran 3 seasons, an eternity considering how quickly network TV tends to eat up and spit out shows this different from the norm. I think a lot of it went over my head at the time, but watching reruns on TV ONE lately, I've come to the conclusion that this is maybe the bleakest, most politically conscious black sitcom of all time. Some of the humor is so dark it makes the Bernie Mac Show look like the Cosby Show. Sometimes the issues and the seriousness of the plots kind of piled on to worsen the fact that the show's comedy often wasn't very sharp, but I have to admire the fact that they pulled no punches. To give you an example, I've seen 2 different episodes (one of them a two-parter) that revolved around Roc, a humble, law-abiding sanitation worker, being charged by the police of crimes he didn't commit, one of them being the murder of a drug dealer Roc had personal differences with. Can you imagine a sitcom tackling a plot like that, like, say, any show that's been on UPN the past 10 years? The cast was really strong, but again, the actual comedic element of the writing wasn't that sharp. But my respect for Orlando Jones went up a bit after seeing his name on the writing credits, considering I've always thought of him as kind of a hack.
2. The Corner
I caught this when BET ran it recently. The Corner is kind of the underappreciated middle child of David Simon's trio of Baltimore based crime dramas, an HBO mini-series that aired in 2000 after the cancellation of Homicide: Life On The Street, and was a precursor to The Wire, which also featured a few of the same cast members. It's also much more about regular folks than those shows, with no cop drama elements as it focuses on the subject of drug addiction. Charles S. Dutton once again repping his hometown as he directs a dramatization of Simon's book of the same name, which followed a Baltimore family and several people around them who were all being impacted directly or indirectly by drug addiction. Khandi Alexander in particular does a great job of depicting a mother and former addict who's so stressed out by trying to keep her kids out of falling into that trap that she ends up lapsing herself. It's really heartbreaking to watch and you're rooting for them all along the way, even though they're the kind of people that get demonized on the evening news here every day. The part that really brings it all home is at the very end of the last episode, when you not only get real-life epilogues of what's happened to each of the people in the story, but Dutton meets and interviews 4 of the real people that the main characters were based on. It just makes it that much more real, seeing them stand on a real Baltimore corner, talking in real Baltimore accents (which are woefully absent from the cast of most of these shows, since I guess people outside Maryland have no idea what a Baltimore accent sounds like or that such a thing even exists).
3. Random 1
I originally wrote about this show back in November when it first went on the air, because my buddy Mike works on the show as an editor. Apparently A&E probably isn't going to pick the show up for a 2nd season, I guess it's not as popular as Roller Girls and they need to make room for more goofy shit like the upcoming Rock Paper Scissors tournament show. It was kind of a cool show, but I can see how they didn't quite develop the sparks, conceptually, and in terms of host charisma, to make it one of those weird popular cable reality shows. Only a handful of the episodes took place in Baltimore, but one of the more recent episodes we saw was centered around a local couple that wanted to open a bar. So the guys on the show helped them get a permit and get started, and the bar turned out to be a place that's like 4 blocks from my apartment, called Ale Mary's, that I've walked by a hundred times since it opened a year or two ago. So that was kinda cool. We keep meaning to go check out that bar.
I remember when I was like 10 years old and my brother and I would go visit our dad in Baltimore and sometimes watch Roc with him. Roc took place in producer/star Charles S. Dutton's native Bmore (although most of it was shot a soundstage somewhere else, there were a fair amount of external shots of real Baltimore blocks), and ran 3 seasons, an eternity considering how quickly network TV tends to eat up and spit out shows this different from the norm. I think a lot of it went over my head at the time, but watching reruns on TV ONE lately, I've come to the conclusion that this is maybe the bleakest, most politically conscious black sitcom of all time. Some of the humor is so dark it makes the Bernie Mac Show look like the Cosby Show. Sometimes the issues and the seriousness of the plots kind of piled on to worsen the fact that the show's comedy often wasn't very sharp, but I have to admire the fact that they pulled no punches. To give you an example, I've seen 2 different episodes (one of them a two-parter) that revolved around Roc, a humble, law-abiding sanitation worker, being charged by the police of crimes he didn't commit, one of them being the murder of a drug dealer Roc had personal differences with. Can you imagine a sitcom tackling a plot like that, like, say, any show that's been on UPN the past 10 years? The cast was really strong, but again, the actual comedic element of the writing wasn't that sharp. But my respect for Orlando Jones went up a bit after seeing his name on the writing credits, considering I've always thought of him as kind of a hack.
2. The Corner
I caught this when BET ran it recently. The Corner is kind of the underappreciated middle child of David Simon's trio of Baltimore based crime dramas, an HBO mini-series that aired in 2000 after the cancellation of Homicide: Life On The Street, and was a precursor to The Wire, which also featured a few of the same cast members. It's also much more about regular folks than those shows, with no cop drama elements as it focuses on the subject of drug addiction. Charles S. Dutton once again repping his hometown as he directs a dramatization of Simon's book of the same name, which followed a Baltimore family and several people around them who were all being impacted directly or indirectly by drug addiction. Khandi Alexander in particular does a great job of depicting a mother and former addict who's so stressed out by trying to keep her kids out of falling into that trap that she ends up lapsing herself. It's really heartbreaking to watch and you're rooting for them all along the way, even though they're the kind of people that get demonized on the evening news here every day. The part that really brings it all home is at the very end of the last episode, when you not only get real-life epilogues of what's happened to each of the people in the story, but Dutton meets and interviews 4 of the real people that the main characters were based on. It just makes it that much more real, seeing them stand on a real Baltimore corner, talking in real Baltimore accents (which are woefully absent from the cast of most of these shows, since I guess people outside Maryland have no idea what a Baltimore accent sounds like or that such a thing even exists).
3. Random 1
I originally wrote about this show back in November when it first went on the air, because my buddy Mike works on the show as an editor. Apparently A&E probably isn't going to pick the show up for a 2nd season, I guess it's not as popular as Roller Girls and they need to make room for more goofy shit like the upcoming Rock Paper Scissors tournament show. It was kind of a cool show, but I can see how they didn't quite develop the sparks, conceptually, and in terms of host charisma, to make it one of those weird popular cable reality shows. Only a handful of the episodes took place in Baltimore, but one of the more recent episodes we saw was centered around a local couple that wanted to open a bar. So the guys on the show helped them get a permit and get started, and the bar turned out to be a place that's like 4 blocks from my apartment, called Ale Mary's, that I've walked by a hundred times since it opened a year or two ago. So that was kinda cool. We keep meaning to go check out that bar.
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on Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 6:30 PM.
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