Static Thoughts - The Thin Blue Line

Tonight marks the return of one of the more eclectic and bizarre installments of our new “Golden Age” of Television: Brooklyn 99.  When Brooklyn 99 premiered a couple years ago it was quickly treated as the next thing in sitcoms and heralded by a lot of critics as something you needed to be watching to be in the know.  However, 3 years later the show holds a very different place in the television landscape as it’s struggled to define its identity as a lighthearted and non-serious cop comedy in the wake of growing concerns over police misconduct and brutality.  Maybe I’ll dedicate more time to Brooklyn 99’s metamorphosis in a future review but for right now, the show’s shift in focus rather than risk getting into more serious fair reminds me of a highly underrated British comedy starring Rowan Atkinson and David Haig entitled The Thin Blue Line. 

Running for only 2 seasons and 14 episodes from 1995 to 1996 The Thin blue Line revolved around the police force of a fictional London small town suburb called Gasforth.  Rowan Atkinson, now having transitioned from the dry witty cad style of comedy that punctuated his work on Blackadder to the more bafoonish cartoon comedy of Mr. Bean, plays the head of the precincts uniformed division as Inspector Raymond Fowler.  On the flip side, David Haig, whom I know mainly from The Thick of It, play Detective Inspector Derek Grim, head of criminal investigations. 

What this essentially means, for those not in the know, is that the show splits the focus down the middle of the police force between the uniformed beat cops under Fowler and the plain-clothes detectives under Grim.  Though rivalries are always a natural set-up for comedy this one is fairly unique as it’s informed by more than just clashing status level at the job but rather a full on class of ideology and values but more on that in a bit.

Even though Grim and some of his officers are afforded focus they’re usually their to generate conflict as most of the stories revolve around Fowler and his collection of constables.  There’s Constable Kevin Goody, played by James Dreyfus, a cartoonish incompetent and lovably effeminate officer who’s often enamored with fellow Constable Maggie Habib, played by Mina Anwar.  Habib is easily the show’s stand out characters and one of the most unique and engaging female cop characters I’ve seen this side of Lady Cop. 

She’s an utterly unique characer and not just because she’s a Muslim woman whose also a cop though to be fair, this is pretty much the only time I’ve encountered that in Western television.  What makes her so much more as a character is how modern she ends up.  It’s long been a rule of sitcoms that men are the goofy ones while the women are the practical ones who get people out of scrapes but The Thin Blue Line takes that in a different direction. 

Rather than having Inspector Fowler as your standard issue dumb group-dad of the precinct his character is that of an overly literal and traditional British stereotype.  The show actually jokes at one point that he was probably born middle aged and Atkinson really sells that to a comical extreme.  He’s the kind of guy who’d rather build airplane models and read Sherlock Holmes than have sex and I mean that very literally.  This ends up forcing Habib into the role of his equal and opposite, an officer who’s every bit as competent as Fowler at the job but informed by sexually liberated sensibilities and modernist pursuits. 

She’s essentially playing “the lady’s man” character archetype from a lot of sitcoms, your Joey from Friends or Barney from How I Met Your Mother, only without the creepy misogynistic undertones those characters tend to bring with them.  What really works is how well the show just LETS Habib be who she is, she’s never punished for her casual attitudes towards sex nor is her being a Muslim ever used as her sole defining character trait.  It also helps that Mina Anwar completely sells her part as the smartest woman in a room full of middle aged men who are very good at acting like they know what they’re doing while they make fools of themselves. 

The cast is rounded out by Rudolph Walker as Constable Frank Gladstone, a Trinidadian constable who’s unfortunately often pushed to the background but is hilarious when he pops up and Serena Evans as police sergeant Patricia Dawkins.  Dawkins is also Fowler’s current girlfriend, which is where a lot of the jokes about how little Fowler cares for sex come up.  It’s actually kind of bizarre watching it as an American, in that if this show was made in the states the dynamic of would almost certainly be reversed with the woman as the more sexually unconcerned partner in a relationship.  Part of this is that Fowler is working from the “no sex please, we’re British” stereotype palette, although it often feels like the show meant for him to be an Asexual man but was just unable to fully realize the idea.  Still, it’s decidedly peculiar to see a sitcom where the two prominent women characters are the ones most concerned with getting laid. 

However, Thin Blue Line makes the smart decision to not just be sex jokes and shockingly well written female characters but actually slip into more serious discussion on things like police misconduct and ethics.  This is what I alluded to earlier about the clash of ideologies between Grim and Fowler.  Fowler is, as mentioned, a by the book, letter of the law type cop, a man defined by his slavish devotion to purpose as expressly stated through the text of his vocation.  Grim, on the other hand, views that kind of police work as reductive and views results as the sole determinate of right, wrong, and justice.   This essentially makes them the age-old clash between those willing to bend the law for results and those who live along the thin blue line. 

The best example of this is series 2 episode 1, Court in the Act (haha,) where Grim plants evidence to incriminate a suspected drug dealer.  As the episode winds to the third act Grim and Fowler enter into a heated debate about the ethics of Grim’s actions, with any pretense of comedy slipping away.  Grim’s justification is that so long as a criminal was put away it doesn’t matter how, that the safety of the public is more important than the stipulations of law.  This is Grim’s viewpoint in a nutshell and goes hand-in-hand with his authoritarian viewpoints and general disdain for systems and rules.  Fowler responds with possibly the perfect embodiment of his own philosophy stating that “the public can be in no greater danger than when the police think themselves above the law.” 

I couldn’t say how the scene was received in 1996 but watching this moment today is shockingly moving and chilling given how relevant it is after a year and a half of unrelenting stories of police misconduct.  That’s true of Thin Blue Line overall, in that while I’m not sure if it was really ahead of its own time it is decidedly ahead of this time and manages to blend comedy and seriousness expertly in a lot of great episodes. 

Maybe there’s a lesson in that beyond just the skill required to pull off the kind of tonal balancing act.  In 1995, saying things like “better a criminal go free than the police become criminals themselves” was treated as common sense, maybe reacting with a bit of befuddlement that it needed to be said at all.  However, 20 years later, we hear those same words and suddenly it’s a powerful declaration for truth and justice against a seemingly massive wave of corruption and violence.  Maybe that means things a worse now or maybe we’re just more aware of how blurry the thin blue line between order and chaos always was.   


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