'American Crime': A Big Cast, 2 Great Performances
When you first hear about it, American Crime might seem more like a homework assignment than a piece of entertainment. From John Ridley, Oscar-winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave, comes this 11-episode series about race, class, and gender. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone smiling in any of the promo ads. Anguish drenches the screen the way people in the Ice Bucket Challenge were soaked with freezing water in videos last year, and from the ads, American Crime looks like it could be just about as unpleasant, only for a longer period of time.
But American Crime proves to be something much better than that. Ridley, who wrote a number of the show’s scripts and directs some episodes, builds his mini-saga around a crime. As it begins on Thursday night, a young California couple has been attacked — the husband killed; the wife wounded, perhaps raped, and in a coma.
We hear about the crime through the police informing the couple’s parents. Felicity Huffman and Timothy Hutton worry that their son’s murder will not be solved quickly by law enforcement. The wife’s parents, played by Penelope Ann Miller and W. Earl Brown, are distraught as their daughter lies in the hospital breathing through tubes.
Related: The ‘American Crime’ Cast on Why You Should Commit to the John Ridley Drama
Suspects in the crime are quickly gathered. They include a young drug-addicted couple (Elvis Nolasco and Caitlin Gerard) and a young man, played by Johnny Ortiz, who in the premiere seems to be little more than an innocent bystander. Race matters here. The parents are all white; most of the suspects are black or brown. Huffman’s Barb Hanlon is a prim racist who refers to anyone not her own ethnicity as “them” or “those people,” which you can imagine doesn’t go over well with the police officers of color she encounters.
What draws you in to American Crime is not the crime. It’s the vivid portrayals of the parents. Not just Barb and Hutton’s Russ, a sad-sack who lets Barb bully him, but the father of Ortiz’s Tony — he’s played by Benito Martinez as a hard-working Mexican-American single-dad who’s exploited by the whites above him and scorned by the Hispanic family and friends around him as being too much of a push-over. American Crime does a good job of using the police-procedural framework to give viewers a structure that’s familiar and compelling. But Ridley makes sure that that structure is also capacious enough to let the actors stretch out, and, at least over the course of the four episodes made available to critics, this yields at least two superb performances.
Martinez has been a strong TV presence before, in shows in which he was a recurring character such as The Shield and House of Cards. Here, he’s a terrific leading-man, trapped between cultures and economic classes that leave him baffled and angry. Huffman has the series’ toughest role. She’s written as a tense, snappish, unlikable woman who doesn’t mind alienating not only the police investigating her son’s death, but also the three other parents of the victims. Huffman gathers all her skills to make Barb a woman who’s holding her pain inside, and has coated her agony with a hard shell of fury.
My advice: Ignore the depressing-looking commercials and give the premiere of American Crime a look. You may stick around, transfixed and wondering what will happen next.
American Crime premieres Thursday, March 5 at 10 p.m. on ABC.
