Rescue Me from Saving Grace, part 2

Ok, so I have to be fair and say that I only landed on the second episode of Saving Grace a few times while channel surfing, but each time I did, I was compelled to go back to the episode of Law & Order SVU that bored me the first 3 times around. (I’ve been sick and watching a lot of TV – OK?).

First click: The tobacco chawing angel Earl is fixing Grace breakfast. She challenges him to prove he is an angel. He spreads his beatific wings and Grace falls to the floor at his feet, bathed in his golden light, looking pure and sweet like a child witnessing her first Christmas tree. I’m sorry, I’ve been having enough trouble with nausea this week.

Second click: Here is Grace with her Christian cross wearing forensics pal, who tells her she’s just going to have to give into the notion that God loves her and there is nothing she can do about it. Grace has a present for her: a feather from one of the angel’s wings! Hie thee to the forensics lab! Does anyone remember the forensics chick from Homicide? I really miss her.

3rd click: Here is Grace kicking the angel’s ass.

Am I missing something here, or is this show just massively misconceived?

Meanwhile over at Rescue Me, Tommy’s wife battles postpartum depression and drugs her baby with Benadryl to stop his crying while Tommy mulls over his ex girlfriend’s offer to take the infant, with whom she has an obvious bond. Seven babies die in a fire. By episode’s end, Tommy is on the brink of dropping his own infant into the East River.

Over the top action sprinkled with ruminations on faith in crisis, free will and predetermination. And the show still manages to be a comedy. You could try to say the same thing about Saving Grace. Why does Rescue Me work, where Saving Grace doesn’t? Why is Denis Leary so much better at creating interesting women than is Saving Grace’s Nancy Miller, who actually is one?

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Rescue Me from Saving Grace…

A few posts back, in my brief celebration of the new season of Rescue Me, I mentioned the dearth of strong female characters on TV and how Leary’s show, about an angry macho NYFD firefighter and “world famous pussy hound” consistently gives us the lion’s share of them.

I don’t mean “strong” in that Oprah-inspired-long-suffering-you-go-girl terms, but strong as in willful, flawed, and intelligent – the sort of woman who has been bloodied by patriarchy perhaps, but remains unbowed. A fighter maybe, but not in that Love of Ages Barbie-doll-hair-tossing-back-biting-manipulator way or of the Bad Girls trailer park-smack fest variety, but, you know, a real woman who knows she has her dark side, and whose cognitive dissonance might make her crazy, but at least she’s animate. Someone who is, even at her worst, a cut above what usually passes for “strong female character” in Hollywood.

One character who seems to aspire to that sort of status is Holly Hunter’s Grace in Saving Grace, TNT’s new entry into the “we’re not afraid to build series around actresses of a certain age” sweepstakes.

I love Holly Hunter, and I’m happy to give anything she’s in more than a second chance. But I’m not sure I’m going to be able to hang with this series. She plays a tough, brilliant homicide detective battling some fairly typical tough brilliant homicide detective problems – a moral imperative to solve tough crimes and save innocents that gets self medicated by the usual suspects: booze, frenzied sex with married co-workers and major “look at me” behavior on the job.

You could almost be tempted to see her as a female Tommy Gavin. In fact, I suspect that this show owes more than a little to Rescue Me’s second season, in which Gavin (created and played by Denis Leary) is stalked by Jesus Christ, who taunts him like the artifact of a deservedly guilty conscious that he is.

Hunter’s Grace is haunted too, by an angel named Earl with a bad Skoal habit. Earl seems like a redneck version of Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life who possesses a pair of wings straight from the prop department of Win Wenders’ Wings of Desire (a rare instance of a movie about angels that works, in my view).

Tommy Gavin’s Jesus works because he’s organic, rising out of Tommy’s Irish Catholic upbringing and dawning awareness of just how out of control his risk-taking has become. Grace’s angel – not so much.

For one thing, Earl is too contrived – the tobacco chewing, the cracker accent, the wings – he’s a puppet with all of his strings showing.

Perhaps more importantly this angel is something that happens to Grace, rather than rising from her, and I find this a completely unappealing conceit.

Grace’s Earl proselytizes, whereas Leary’s Jesus is Tommy’s own moral center. He comes off as funny, profane, and provocative in a way that Saving Grace would like to be, but just doesn’t have the chops to carry off.

Not that the show doesn’t have its allures. Besides Hunter there is Laura San Giacomo, who could sink her teeth into realizing a multi-faceted character in the form of a forensic scientist with religious faith, and who probably won’t get the chance.

The look and sound of the show are terrifically seductive; dreamy, gritty, fantastic and hyperreal in turns.

The male characters feel peripheral, except for that sanctimonious angel – and you know, that’s OK. For once, let the men be inconsequential love interests and scene candy.

My main complaint with Saving Grace is that ultimately Grace is drawn as a bad girl who has been chosen by God for saving. She is a victim in need of rescuing, which completely denatures any inner strength Hunter projects into the role.

Kill the angel, kill the God talk, and don’t even start with the “Hi I’m Grace and I’m an…” Let Grace save herself with her own inner strength and some help from her friends the way most interesting women do.

She doesn’t need a crutch in the form of crusty Earl and his annoying tobacco spit.

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