Cops, Cons, Camps and Curling

 Streaming Dust-Up

Line of Duty, produced by Jed Mercurio, 2012-2021

This series, produced by the BBC, is a rarity.  It is not some conventional cop / detective hosanna, full of the predictable tropes of crime shows.  It is centered around an internal police investigative unit, AC-12, which is looking into a large network of corrupt police tied to organized crime.  The corruption involves 4 top officers in the London Metropolitan Police, along with their uniformed minions and cops caught up in the ring.

In U.S. TV, police internal affairs groups are hated (see Law & Order, etc.) but in England it seems they are somewhat legit.  Now the odd part is that as the series went on, cop leaders and an older female ‘top cop’ preside over the Police.  She – and others around her – are eager to present the Metro Police as having no systemic corruption problem.  Oddly, this old lady reminds one of Cressida Dick, who did preside over London's Metropolitan Police in reality and just retired.  She hated Line of Duty.

Cressida Dick

At any rate, the seasons of Line of Duty involves hard-bitten and thorough cop liars, constant unreal and unnecessary plot twists and AC-12 officers who are tough and still make mistakes.  One AC-12 officer can’t keep himself from having sexual relationships with suspects, informants and fellow officers.  The old Irish gaffer leading the crew toughs out every stupid or corrupt overseer who tries to shut down his investigations.  The lead AC-12 woman officer goes undercover in other departments to root out the slime balls.  At this point their task is to find ‘the fourth man’ – the last remaining top officer linked to the bloody world of organized criminals. AC12 has already nailed 3 ‘bent’ top coppers in earlier parts of the series. 

Like the long line of television series and movies exposing the partial criminality of the CIA, it is refreshing to see this trend now focused on the police.  The U.S. certainly needs a show looking into bad forensics, neglected rape kits, planted evidence, organized lying, illegitimate seizures of property, selective enforcement, police corruption and racist crimes, but no U.S. studio will go over that line in a streaming series. Line of Duty is rated as one of the top shows in Britain. It is in its 6^th season.

Inventing Anna, produced by Shonda Rhimes, 2022

This show is a fictional representation of the real life New York con artist Anna Delvey, a.k.a. Sorokina.  She ingratiated herself into New York society – society matrons, artists, architects, haute couture and most importantly, lawyers and top bankers, attempting to start an exclusive private arts club and foundation.  

Sorokina had no money, no experience, a hidden Russian background, a fake rich father and a fake Trust Fund, a fake name and a very unpleasant personality.  But she did observe these society people in their natural habitat and adopted many of their customs in order to fit in, like a cow bird laying eggs in another bird’s nest. For a time she defrauded these ‘worldly’ nincompoops and institutions, along with her 'friends,' into paying her bills, giving her massive loans, stealing their property and working on her Anna Delvey ‘Foundation,’ sometimes for free. She commits check fraud and phone impersonations. Her relationship started as a parasitic relationship with another bogus tech entrepreneur, along with a real society woman. Both gave her entrée into the hidden precincts of New York’s ruling elite.

The investigative lead is a naïve, improbable, pregnant and thick-headed but driven journalist working for Manhattan Magazine – a renaming of New York magazine.  She is shown as unprofessional and unethical, as she actually helps the defense.  She slowly digs up some facts of Anna’s story, partly through repeated visits with Anna in Riker’s Island jail.  Anna herself, played by the same actress who played Ruth in Ozark, has a terrible, bogus accent that does not sound German. The accent alone would give her away. The series seem to have a tolerant and 'hip' appreciation of Anna – is she a proletarian hero, getting back at the bankers?  Is she a sad social climber?  Is she a poor young woman oppressed by older men who don’t pay for their mistakes?  That is certainly one of her manipulative lines.  Or is she just a plain shit that bought into the bourgeois fable of entrepreneurship, luxury and money?  I think the latter.  She is a delusional consumerist and sociopath, a fake feminist, but coming from a working-class background.

As an aside, her most gullible friends and acquaintances are young women like herself, which makes out these women as helplessly naive.  The young female reporter is sympathetic, while the series shows Sorokina as a fashion and media sensation, getting her 15 minutes of fame - which we are supposed to take as a hoot.  The trial defense is shown, while none of the prosecution. Key facts about the crimes are left out, like the forgeries she used to try to prove she had collateral.   The series' obsession over Anna by her goofy defense attorney and the mugging reporter is completely weird.  Netflix's framing is actually a participant in this fraud.  

What is best about the series is showing the extraordinary wealth and inbred clubbiness of this spoiled group of New Yorkers.  Their yachts, country houses, Bergdorff expense accounts, extravagant parties, exclusive sports clubs, upscale hotel stays, private jets, art buys, huge apartments, designer clothing, lavish accessories, champagne lust, drinking binges and completely catered lifestyles make it easy to see why expropriation would be quite a satisfying answer to this class of snobby fucks.  The series mentions similar frauds like the Fyre Festival, Marvin Shrekli and Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, so it puts Anna's actions in the context of a culture of moneyed bullshit, legal and illegal. New York comes off as a modern version of Rome, Versailles, the Winter Palace, the Forbidden City, Batista’s Havana or a decaying Abu Dubai.  It is the permanent Davos of present day capital.

By the way, Anna's approach of 'fake it until you make it' is also the approach of multi-level marketing schemes, otherwise known as Ponzi schemes - which is what this was.  See the "Tinder Swindler" for a romance fraud who wanted to live the life of a capitalist billionaire, and runs Ponzi games on unwitting women to get their money.

Creepy facts: Netflix and Rimes paid beaucoup bucks - $350K - to Sorokina for her 'side' of the story, money that was (partly?) taken by the courts to pay restitution.  So Netflix was taken in by this con artist too. Sorokina spent around 2 years in jail on a 4-12 year sentence (how does that happen?) and is again in police custody in 9/21 due to deportation proceedings back to Germany after overstaying her visa.  Of course, she is appealing.

‘The Humanity Bureau’ Movie: 

The Humanity Bureau is another cultural product about escaping from the U.S. to Canada, this time in the apocalyptic aftermath of climate change and nuclear meltdowns.  It involves a government-sponsored “New Eden” which is really a death camp for poor citizens patterned after the Nazi extermination camps.  A euphemistic ‘Humanity Bureau’ enforces the deportations to New Eden. As we know, Orwellian euphemisms are all the rage for present ruling class organizations and this one is a doozy. 7 million die in the camps.  Revolution follows when the truth leaks out.  A sad, aged, weird Nicholas Cage is the lead.   

And Speaking of the Olympics: 

If you’ve watched the Olympics in some way, you will note several things – besides the corporate commercialism, middle class professionalism, toxic nationalism and examples of bad journalism and vicious politics. 

1.  The largest television showing of women’s sports of the year. Fabulous examples of kinetic / physical intelligence.

2.  The new, mixed gender events.

3.   The competitive winning idiocy of being ‘off the podium’ because of losing by 1/100s of a second.   Time for some ties.   

4.  The differences between a sports contest that demands a huge investment in engineering and concrete; and a simple event that needs basic equipment.  Examples of the useless former:  Luge, ‘Skeleton,’ Bobsled, Half Pipe, Snowboard Big Air, Ski Jumping.  Examples of the latter:  Cross Country and Downhill Skiing, Speed Skating, Ice Dancing, Hockey, Downhill Snowboard, Moguls, Biathlon, Curling.   If we ever have a proletarian Olympics again, we’d think about getting rid of the former events as involving very few people and being a huge waste of labor, concrete and steel. 

5.  The pressure to ‘win’ in front of millions of people every 4 years seems to be a cruel emotional trap.  These are the wages of isolated, middle-class professionalism. 

6.  Injuries!  Broken bones, torn ligaments, concussions, you name it.

7.  A very well-organized, almost flawless Olympics, without a CoVid outbreak - totally unmentioned by U.S media.

8.  The enjoyment of seeing the U.S. lose to Finland, China, Slovenia, Canada and Norway.

Stay tuned: 

Ozark is in its last tense and overly plot-twisted season.  Ozark has become an exposure of the corruption of the FBI.  It was mostly filmed in Georgia around Lake Lanier, not the 'Lake of the Ozarks. (Prior review of Ozark below.)

Most importantly, The Peaky Blinders last season will be airing soon.  Steven Knight, its producer and director, grew up in Small Heath in Birmingham, England in a working class family, so he knows the world he created.  Birmingham’s Small Heath neighborhood is the central location of the series. The Romani Peakys will confront Mosely’s domestic fascists in the 1930s once again, though without the aid of Helen McCrory, who played Polly Shelby, the matriarch of the Shelby family gang.  She died of cancer in 2021 at 52.  (Prior review of the Peaky Blinders below.)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of streaming reviews, using these terms:  “Peaky Blinders,” “Ozark,” “The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cops Shows,” “Streaming Run-Down,” “The Good Lord Bird,” “Trapped and Detective Series in General,” “Watchmen,” “3%,” “Maid,” “Goliath,” “Cults and Cultists,” “Rebellion,” Handmaid’s Tale,” Comrade Detective,” “The Wire,” “Treme,” “Vikings,” “Black Sails,” “Game of Thrones,” “Deadwood,” “Damnation,” “Fargo,” “White Lotus,” “Mayans M.C.,” “The Golden Age of U.S. Television,” “Hunger Games,” “Line of Separation.”

The Cultural Marxist

February 15, 2022