For decades, series creators have been tripping over “The Wire” and its first wave of imitators, trying to recapture a strand or two of that inspired Baltimore mosaic’s scope and impact. “61st Street,” which premiered Sunday on AMC+, is merely the latest.
But it’s also one of the good ones — limited on one hand by familiar storytelling zigs and zags, but humanized on the other by terrific performances, led by Courtney B. Vance, doing some of his finest work in his trademark, paradoxical sweet spot: spectacular understatement.
Vance plays public defender Franklin Roberts, facing a grim cancer diagnosis he keeps largely to himself. He’s taking on the case of a lifetime. The series, for which Vance also receives producer credit, follows familiar narrative contours and criss-crosses. Everyone harbors a secret that must come out. Yet the show comes also with distinct ripples of moral ambiguity amid the ingrained racism, deep-seeded tribalism and pervasive civic corruption. That’s code for “set in Chicago.”
Creator and showrunner Peter Moffat wastes no time in cranking up the pressure cooker in episode one. Seven of the first season’s eight episodes were made available for review; “61st Street” has a second, eight-episode season ready to go for next year.
College-bound track star Moses Johnson, played by Tosin Cole, runs afoul of a Chicago Police Department sting operation near his South Side home. Lt. Brannigan (Holt McCallany, making a faded blueprint of a dirty cop vividly compelling) fires his weapon; one of the drug dealers hits the street, leaving Chicago with its latest Black victim of what “61st Street” plainly depicts as a venal character taking a very, very bad shot.
In a panic Moses flees, chased by a CPD officer (Patrick Mulvey) who dies in the pursuit. The headlines write themselves. The fuse is lit, again. Not unlike the earlier eight-episode “state of Chicago” crime drama, “The Red Line” (2019), “61st Street” darts between storylines and Chicago institutions. Vance’s character, Franklin, represents Moses in the eventual murder trial. His wife Martha (Aunjanue Ellis, lately of “King Richard,” and excellent enough to make you want more of her character’s story) is running for 5th Ward Alderman. For 17 years she has been the overwhelmingly primary caretaker of their son (Jarell Maximillian Sullivan), who is living with autism. One episode in “61st Street” in particular grinds the viewer’s guts with this young man’s encounter with the police, which leads to a fairly shameless cliffhanger.
The narrative veers from politics to the courtroom to the prison ecosystem navigated by Moses and his incarcerated gangbanger father. Filmed in various South Side locations, always placing the actors underneath a shadow-casting elevated train line, “61st Street” has a tendency to settle for a triggering sort of dread in its vignettes and incidents, restating for dramatic purposes the worst of what we’ve seen in real life in recent years. Yet as more than one character says, it’s all been going on a long, bloody time.
Something happens pretty early on in the series, fortunately. The characters start edging toward shades of gray even when the writing sticks to archetypes. For every line you could do without — “a man can’t theorize on an empty stomach,” one drug dealer says — you get a seriously tense and nuanced confrontation, such as the one between Ellis’ Martha and a grieving mother outside Martha’s campaign headquarters. “You Hyde Park liberals,” the woman says to the aspiring alderman. “All you care about is the life of a scholarship boy.”
In scenes like that, and there are plenty, “61st Street” complicates its own storytelling, rewardingly, and reminds viewers that Chicago is not a monolith. With, among others, Michael B. Jordan executive producing, the show feels authentic enough in its dynamics and locales to ward off that clueless-in-Chicago feeling so many TV and film projects have generated. The intersecting storylines hold enough interest to pull you through the odd cliche and the occasional thesis line. And Vance, as a modest soul trying to outrun any number of clocks, really is a marvel.
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‘61ST STREET’
3 stars (out of 4)
Rating: TV-MA
How to watch: Premiered Sunday on AMC; also on AMC+ and ALLBLK streaming platforms.
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