So, as a terrible joke (the use of the word “joke” is charitable), a friend and I started calling this show “Cobbler” and now I can’t get it out of my head. So, let’s cobble it out.
It’s the early ‘60s. The 1860s, that is, and we’re located in the Five Points, a la Gangs of New York. The Civil War rages, but we don’t really care. Our main character is “Copper” Kevin, a former Civil War soldier who returned with his daughter dead and his wife…missing? We open with an ambush of three would-be bank robbers. Well, they get the robbing part right and all, but are taken out a few yards from the bank by Kevin and two colleagues. The take down is violent – they shoot first, and ask questions later, though with good reason, and grab some of the cash before their superiors gather it up for return to the bank. They’re not corrupt; that’s just the way the 1860s work.
Kevin and his partner each have their own lady loves, I can’t really figure out a whole lot about them from the pilot. He also gets an offer to referee a boxing match from the scion of a rich family, something or other Morehouse, who likes Kevin because Kevin gave him an assist in the war – always the great social equalizer. While there he meets the prototypical rich local plutocrat, Mr. Haverford and his English wife, Mrs. Haverford. You might be seeing them again!
Soon, a girl is found murdered. Kevin notices that she is the girl he saw earlier, in the first scene, who talked to him for one second for some reason. Sorry, forgot to mention that earlier. Through some investigation, Kevin learns that the dead girl is the sister of the earlier girl, and that the earlier girl was kidnapped to work as a prosititue by the nefarious local madam, the contessa, before running away. He takes the dead girl’s body to some random black guy who is apparently his personal M.E. (why are a black guy and a white guy being friends at this point – easy answer – war buddies), and whose wife is played by the actress who played Wallace’s love Jackie in the second season of Veronica Mars. Black M.E. (now there’s a show title) tells us that she was raped, well, after death, so I suppose not technically rape, but you get the idea. In addition, she was hit in the head with a blunt object. Kevin pays the contessa a visit and beats up one of her doorman, a bulky dude, who Kevin is convinced kills the girl, because, well, he’s big, and why not? Kevin beats the shit out of him, without a confession, but leaves him handcuffed in a room/torture chamber.
Kevin pays a return visit to Black M.E. who tells him, ah hah, it was a staff that did the damage, and the man had to be a certain height – taller than the guard who Kevin initially suspected. Kevin feels slightly bad about the guy he just beat, but realizes where he saw a cane, at the home rich local plutocrat Mr. Haverford, who he immediately knows did it. He steals the staff, as evidence, and then brings it to his superiors. Of course, because this is America, where the rich, no matter when, buy their way out of criminal activity, his bosses arrange it so that the guard he originally beat was “guilty” and sentenced to death, settling the matter, even though everyone knows what really went down. Justice! Kevin is disgusted but powerless. He settles down, hopefully having saved the girl’s sister (who they found later and hid from the scary plutocrat; sorry, forgot to mention that), for now, before at the end, he is confronted by Mrs. Haverford, who asks if her husband committed the crime. He did, Kevin, tells her.
I wanted the show to be better than it was. I have surprisingly little sense of what the show is from just the one episode. If I had to guess, there will be a case every episode with slow advances on the personal lives of the two main coppers and the pursuit of evil plutocrat Mr. Haverford. However, it could easily become a longer arc-ed show right off, which would almost certainly be the more interesting choice. I think there’s a lot of very easy ways to make a show like this interesting (in this case, good) but I’m not all that confident that the show will trend in that direction based on what I got in the first episode. From just one episode each, I think I’m a bit more interested in Hell on Wheels than Copper in terms of recent shows set in the second half of the 19th century.
Will I watch it again? Maybe. Actually, as fall starts, it immediately jumps behind a number of other shows. I wanted to like it more than I did, as I said, but that’s the show’s fault as much as mine; it definitely could have been more inspiring. I was hoping for something more than what seems awful like a police procedural set 150 years in the past. In an idle moment maybe I’ll try to sneak in a second episode to get a real batter sense for how the show is going to work, but if it ends up just being another single episode case, than that episode will probably be the last I watch. More serial TV, please.
Television, the Drug of the Nation 
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