In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, ABC
There was a time when the anthology show ruled US airwaves. Jobbing actors would show up for a week in The Twilight Zone, The Night Gallery, General Electric Theater, Studio One or whatever, then move on to the next gig. But increasing production values, logistical difficulties and viewer choice started to make that weekly anthology show more or less impossible; the power of stardom also meant that if you could get an actor or actress with a significant fanbase in a starring role, people would watch week after week, no matter what the story, which made the anthology show less and less attractive.
But over the past few years, the format has started to return. It began, oddly enough with Love Bites, a somewhat terrible NBC romcom that featured a different couple every week. That failed very, very quickly, in part because the scripts were just awful, but also because the formula wasn’t quite right. Weekly wasn’t the way to go.
Instead, it was cable that developed the correct format for a modern anthology show, with first American Horror Story and then True Detective. With an audience who likes serial drama but who wants eventual conclusions to their stories that haven’t been drawn out too long, what could be better than a season-long story with a beginning, middle and an end, the next season then telling a completely new story in the same vein? With a bit of cleverness, you can even appease fans of the shows’ stars by having the cast come back to play different characters if they want – or just let them go off to the next job if they’d rather, just like in the old days, since that way you can get big names with limited availability to come in for just a season.
It’s a scheme that certainly worked with ABC’s American Crime, a ‘so good it could have been HBO’ drama about the terrible effects of the American judicial system and all the other systems that have evolved around it. Now ABC are hoping to repeat the show’s success with Wicked City, a “a character-driven, true crime procedural that explores sex, politics and popular culture across various noteworthy eras in LA history”.
The first season is set in 1980. Or maybe 1982. A few years after LA’s Hillside Strangler struck, anyway. Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl) is a serial killer on the make, emulating his idol, the Strangler, by killing girls he picks up in bars then leaving them dead in the same places. It’s something to do with his father having left when he was eight, apparently.
Then one night, he’s about to chop the head off Erika Christensen (Six Degrees, Parenthood) and then have sex with her corpse, when she reveals she’s a single mother. Things get even better when it turns out that not only does she have sociopathic tendencies of her own – she’s one of the killer nurses you hear so much about it these days – she quite enjoys pretending to be a corpse while Ed Westwick has sex with her.
It’s a match made in heaven, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, a couple of brave male, squabbling cops – Jeremy Sisto (Kidnapped, Suburgatory, The Returned) and Gabriel Luna (Matador) – are on Westwick’s trail, hoping to stop him before he can kill yet more young women. All while listening to as many 80s classics and using as many pagers, rotary dial payphones, old Mustangs and 4:3 TVs as the music and props departments can provide.
Unfortunately, there is one problem with the modern anthology format that Wicked City fails to overcome: you actually need to make people want to watch the next season, or even the next episode, hopefully by writing some good scripts. And avoiding complete moral bankruptcy.
