Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Red Line’ On CBS, A Limited Series About How A Racially-Charged Police Shooting Affects Three Families

It doesn’t seem that network TV tries ambitious dramas anymore; emotionally-manipulative shows like This Is Us seem to be the closest they get to dramas that don’t feel like the same-old procedural stuff you’ve seen since CSI debuted almost 20 years ago. But when a network throws support behind superstar producers, the results can still be pretty good. This is the case with The Red Line, where Greg Berlanti and Ava DuVernay are both executive producers. Read on for more on this ambitious miniseries…

THE RED LINE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Aerial shots of Chicago. Then we cut to a hospital where a doctor resuscitates a blood-covered man who stops breathing.

The Gist: The doctor’s name is Harrison Brennan (Corey Reynolds). At the end of his shift, he calls home and gets his daughter Jira (Aliyah Royale), who’s practicing her surgery skills on a tablet. She gives the phone over to her father and Harrison’s husband, Daniel Calder (Noah Wyle), who tells Harrison to get milk on the way home.

When Harrison stops at a convenience store for milk, a robbery happens while he’s inside and the cashier gets pistol-whipped; the cops come after the assailant leaves, and see Harrison, a Black man in a hoodie, leaning over trying to help the cashier, who’s swatting him away. Without any warning, officer Paul Evans (Noel Fisher) shoots Harrison twice in the back, then leans over the dying doctor as the cashier says, “It’s the wrong guy!”

Cut to six months later. Jira and Daniel are set to return to her school in their North Side neighborhood, where Daniel also teaches, and they’re still both raw from Harrison’s tragic death. They both get support from one of Daniel’s colleagues, English teacher Liam Bhatt (Vinny Chhibber), whose motivations, at least when it comes to Daniel, may or may not be just friendship. It’s also a hard day because they find out that Evans won’t get hit with federal charges. Daniel and Jira’s lawyer encourages him to file a lawsuit against the city.

Meanwhile, Tia Young (Emayatzy Corinealdi), a lawyer spurred on by Harrison’s shooting, decides to run for alderman in her South Side district, where she lives with her subway operator husband Ethan (Howard Charles) and six-year-old son. She’s running on the notion that the city doesn’t need more cops, as the well-entrenched incumbent Nathan Gordon (Glynn Turman) is campaigning for, but she wants existing cops to be better trained, so they don’t get sued for shooting defenseless Black people. She has a bit of a personal stake in this, one that no one but her husband and a few other family members know: Jira is her daughter, whom she put up for adoption seventeen years ago, when she was just a teenager.

On the West Side, Evans is being fiercely supported by his partner Vic Renna (Elizabeth Laidlaw) and his brother Jim (Michael Patrick Thornton), who is in a wheelchair after being shot in the line of duty. After the announcement that there won’t be any charges, Vic lets Evans know that she took the store’s surveillance tape, because it showed that he didn’t announce himself before shooting Brennan.

We see Jira, who can’t deal with people feeling sorry for her at school, ditch and go to the agency that facilitated her adoption, looking to contact her birth mother. She’s told she needs her dad’s permission because she’s under 18. That night, she tearfully asks Daniel to help her, saying “I want more family.” “Don’t you think I wake up every morning wishing it had been me?” Daniel says. “It would have never happened to you,” she replies, summing up exactly why she wants to get to know her birth mother.

Our Take: The Red Line is certainly an ambitious show for network television in general and CBS in particular; we haven’t seen a network show with such a Peak TV sheen — including the hot-button issues it explores — since ABC’s American Crime series. The show certainly has the right people behind it, with uber-producer Greg Berlanti and Selma director Ava DuVernay as two of the show’s executive producer (Erica Weiss and Caitlin Parrish are the co-creators, and Sunil Nayar is the showrunner). And, while there are still some issues that are likely due to network interference and/or limitations, the show is still a compelling watch, mainly due to emotionally raw performances from Wyle and Royale.

Maybe it’s because Brennan’s shooting was such an egregious, racially-charged mistake on the part of Evans, it’s hard to see his side of this issue. So when we cut to scenes with Evans, it looks like Vic and Jim are more evil tropes than anything else. There’s no shading to the two; they think Evans made an honest mistake that shouldn’t cost him his freedom or job, and don’t ever pause to consider the fact that a family lost a father and husband because Evans wasn’t trained to defuse a situation before firing away. Evans, for his part, is racked with guilt, and his reaction to Vic’s cover-up shades him a bit more than his “Irish brotherhood” supporters on the force.

We’re also not quite sure why Tia, at least through the first two episodes, keeps going back and forth about Jira and why her husband doesn’t want her to meet her daughter. His motivation is that news that she got pregnant as a teen will derail her political ambitions, plus may be hurtful to her personally. But, considering all that Jira has gone through over the last six months, we’d think she’d want to reach out, especially when Daniel finally caves and reaches out through the agency. That being said, we’re also not sure why Daniel is so reluctant to introduce Jira to her birth mom, considering how desperately she’s crying out for more support. The notion that Tia “didn’t want” Jira feels like it comes from a script written in the early ’90s; believe us, that’s not the proper language around adoption these days, as we’ll discuss in a bit.

But, the show doesn’t take any shortcuts to telling the story and tries its best to shade everyone’s points of view. We also like the fact that Harrison and Daniel are a same-sex couple; that aspect is treated as matter-of-fact, even though in the second episode Daniel attends an LGBTQ gala to honor his late husband. The fact that Harrison was gay just shades things even more, and is just treated as one aspect of the Brennan-Calder family’s life.

As we get into the second episode (CBS will air the 8 episodes in two-episode blocks over 4 weeks), we see some more shading around many of the characters, including Tia. As Jira continues to plead with her dad to reach out to her birth mom, she gives some speeches about why she needs someone who knows what she’s going through that hit home for us and sent chills up the spine. (and anyone who knows us knows why). There aren’t many network dramas we can say that about, even emotionally-manipulative ones like This Is Us.

Sex and Skin: Nah, not on this show just yet.

Parting Shot: At the end of the second episode, Jira gets an e-mail from Tia (not sure how Tia found her address) with the subject: “I’m your mom.”

Sleeper Star: We can’t say enough about Royale’s natural, emotional performance. We’re also happy to see that her best friend Reily is not only gender-neutral, but is played by a queer, gender-neutral actor (JJ Hawkins). And it’s not a big deal.

Most Pilot-y Line: The language surrounding Jira’s adoption is very outdated. Kids aren’t “given up” for adoption; they’re “placed for adoption.” Birth parents are often called “first parents,” though that’s optional. Adoptees aren’t told that their first parents “didn’t want” them, because the desire to give their kids a better life than they can provide is a difficult act of love. And parents are supposed to be much more supportive than Daniel was when their teenage kids want to find out about their birth parents. It feels like an adoption plot out of 1992 instead of 2019. Believe us, we know.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The performances and shaded characters in The Red Line make up for the show’s flaws. If you can DVR it or watch it on CBS All Access, it is a good one to binge … if you can handle the show’s emotional roller-coaster.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream The Red Line on CBS