“Wicked City” (10 p.m. Eastern Tuesdays on ABC) is a mix of one thing I really like (20th century period pieces) and one thing I don’t care for (murder mystery shows where we are told who the murderer is). I admired the pilot episode for its style, but not as much for its substance. Still, the style will have me sticking with it awhile longer.
I consider “American Dreams” to be a masterpiece of portraying the 1960s and “Swingtown” gets the same honor for the 1970s. “The Carrie Diaries” never totally clicked with the 1980s for me – for example, I noticed modern credit-card readers on vending machines and 1990s-style TVs, and while the computers were 1980s models, it was somewhat jarring that they never get used.
“Wicked City,” after one episode, looks like it will give much more attention to detail and make a pitch for being a definitive portrait of the era. Set in 1982 in Los Angeles, the pilot episode features boxy computers with green type on a black screen and a Teletype machine at the police precinct, and the cop makes use of a pager. The cars, fashions and hairstyles look right, and most importantly, the Whisky a Go Go scenes seem spot-on, with characters shouting to be heard over a live concert by Billy Idol (who we see from a distance; this isn’t like “American Dreams” where we see a whole performance by a guest singer).
While there are no doubt anachronisms in the pilot episode (an IMBD user notes that some of the Billy Idol songs we hear weren’t released by August 1982), there aren’t any glaring ones like in “Carrie Diaries,” so I wasn’t jarred out of the story. I’m on the fence, though, about whether the story is worth following. As Kent, Ed Westwick has grown from his gawky “Gossip Girl” look into a suave club hopper who picks up girls and kills them in his car. Betty (Erika Christensen, halfway between her “Parenthood” mom role and her unstable “Swimfan” role) – whom Kent doesn’t kill when he learns she has kids — is increasingly intrigued by Kent’s proclivities.
Karen McClaren (Taisa Farmiga) could be a meek friend of Carrie from “Carrie Diaries.” She wants to chronicle “all this” – referring to the Sunset Strip scene – for Rolling Stone. But she sets aside her “Almost Famous” dreams and gets sucked into the serial killer case when she and her photographer sidekick Diver (Evan Ross) come across a crime scene. That crime is being investigated by LAPD Detective Jack Roth (Jeremy Sisto), basically the same character Sisto played in “Law & Order” and “Kidnapped.”
Statistics show that the 1980s marked the peak of violent crime in America on an arc that started rising in the 1960s and has declined from the 1990s to today. “Wicked City” is set in the wake of the closing of the Hillside Strangler case. So Kent’s killing spree fits with the zeitgeist of the time. One gets the sense that an early ’80s L.A. denizen could feel both free and anonymous, and that Kent’s – and to a lesser extent, Betty’s — psychological issues reflect this era.
Kent kills to feel alive, and also perhaps to be recognized. Kent is a bit agitated when Jack falsely tells the TV media that the killer of the pre-credits victim has confessed (there is no suspect or confession), but that he won’t announce the killer’s name due to the killer’s desire for attention. But of course, he doesn’t give up his morbid hobby, otherwise there wouldn’t be a series.
In showing us the killer right up front, “Wicked City” loses any sense of mystery as Jack pursues the case. To me, that leaves the show with an empty core, and as such, a viewer has to really dig the rest of it. The period trappings hook me, but the show needs amazing characters and performances in the long run.
“Wicked City” suffers from coming out in the wake of “Hannibal,” which got into Hannibal Lecter’s mind and featured the most shocking and disturbing images in TV history. The headless corpse that kicks off “Wicked City” is oh so tame compared to “Hannibal,” which would probably use the head as part of a grand sculpture with hundreds of other body parts. The scene where Betty is turned on by Kent tying her to the bedposts is more likely to be seen in an indie movie than on network TV, but it’s still tame in a post-“Hannibal” world where – even though we’re much less likely to be murdered than in 1982 – we are desensitized to violent or racy images.
Still, Sisto is always solid, Westwick is perfectly cast and Christensen is a wonderful, versatile actress. The set and costume designers and hairstylists seem committed to making “Wicked City” look great, so if the writing follows suit, this series has potential.
Main image: ABC publicity photo