The Chicago Code

A short time after the series was canceled in america, Sky TV started to broadcast the first (and now only) series of this new police drama.

It quickly set the scene: a new superintendent (apparently that's not a janitor, it's a senior officer - as a dialog with an antagonistic, jailed, gang-leader informs us), a woman no less, wants to start a crusade against organised crime in Chicago. We are quickly led to believe that the leader of the corruption is no less than the guy in charge of the city and that she is out to prove it.

So, we have our protagonists: the lady cop and a grunt who's incapable of working with anyone else as he thinks he's better than all his partners. We have our antagonist: the fat-cat politician who pulls the strings on organised crime to serve his will. We have some set-piece nastiness to further convince us and we have a new partner for Mr. Better-than-everybody-else to inject some emotional and personal conflict into the situation. Oh yes, it turns out that Mrs. Top Cop also used to be the guy's partner, too.

Let's quickly go down the list of cop-show cliches and see if we've missed anything out. .... nope, can't spot any - they're all there, even down to the ex-wife and new girlfriend and under-the-wing relative in the force.

And that just about sums up The Chicago Code. It's well put together. The dialog works on a cop-show level: it's never going to be mistaken for Shakespeare. The scenes are set out in the finest traditions of the Chicago Tourist Board and there's just the right mix of shootings, killings, drugs and violence to remind us that this is an american cop show. That's pretty much all there to it. It runs to the formula and if you like that, that's great. It won't make you think and you won't have to agonise over whether any given character is good or bad, or misguided or under duress - it's pretty black and white (though the racial element is given to the Irish community of Chicago, none of whom have ever stepped outside the USA, either in character or in person).
If this series had been screened 20 or 30 years ago, it could (could) have been original. However now it's just another cop show: we've seen 'em all before.