Flashdance 5-0

After my recent blog post bemoaning the lack of roles for boomer actors and actresses, I really wanted to like Fox's new cop show, The Chicago Code.

It's great to see a network build a show around a middle-aged woman -- in this case, Jennifer Beals, a 47-year-old actress who has been on the brink of stardom for decades but has never quite reached it. Alas, I reluctantly report, while The Chicago Code is a cut above, say, the generic west coast clones of Law & Order and NCIS, unfortunately, it's not that good, or at least not as good as it should be.

You probably remember Beals as Alex, the charismatic welder-turned-dancer in the 1983 aerobic-romance flick Flashdance. That movie earned a then-impressive $100 million at the box office and briefly turned leg warmers and strategically ripped sweatshirts into fashion essentials. Even critic Roger Ebert, who loathed the movie, was enthralled by the 20-year-old Yale student with the angelic face framed by ringlets; he hailed Beals as a "natural talent" and "fresh and engaging." The actress has played a lot of roles in movies and TV since then, but none as big, and she never became a marquee name like, say, Meg Ryan or Melanie Griffith. All the same, her portrayal of Bette Porter, a gay woman with a tempestuous, troubled life in Showtime's critically acclaimed The L Word, helped restore some buzz, as did her reoccurring role as Tim Roth's ex-wife and sometime lover in Fox's Lie to Me. So it seems like her turn to be a star again, at last.

On paper, The Chicago Code might seem like the perfect star vehicle for Beals, who happens to be a Chicago native. It's got a tantalizing premise: A woman cop, Teresa Colvin, rises meteorically through the ranks and is named superintendent, mostly because sleazy politicians and gangsters and their entrenched minions within the force figure she'll be a weak figurehead. When Colvin instead tries to clean up the city, she becomes a target from every angle.

Best of all, the series is set in Chicago -- a city rife with iconic landmarks, from the 'L' overhead railway to the Tribune Tower, and which has an epic tradition of crime and public corruption since the days of Al Capone. It's being produced by Shawn Ryan, who was behind Fox's sister cable channel FX's jarringly provocative cop drama, The Shield.

And the supporting cast has some actors who've done solid work. Delroy Lindo, who portrays crooked alderman Ronin Gibbons, has been playing menacing tough guys on the screen for so long it's easy to forget his early brilliance in complex roles as a stage actor. (At a hulking 6-foot-4, he's a good fit for what Walt Whitman called "the city of big shoulders.") Australian Jason Clarke, who starred as an Irish-American criminal in blue-collar Providence in Showtime's Brotherhood a few years back, switches ethnicities as Polish-American detective Jarek Wysocki, a streetwise but mercurial risk-taker who hasn't stuck with a partner since he teamed with Colvin (Beals). Matt Lauria, late of the critically acclaimed but ratings-adverse Friday Night Lights, is an earnest young by-the-book investigator trying to win Wysocki's approval. Best of all, Fox apparently has given Ryan license to create a complex, long-arc narrative like that of HBO's acclaimed The Wire.

With all those pluses, The Chicago Code should work far better than it does. So what goes wrong?

One big problem is Beals. Even as she approaches 50, she's still got that perky ambiance and conspicuously youthful glow, as if she stopped to get a spa treatment on the way to the murder scene. She just doesn't project the sort of world-weary toughness you would expect to see in someone who's spent the past 20 years wallowing in depravity while simultaneously battling misogynists within the ranks. (She might do well to study Washington, D.C., police chief Cathy Lanier, who is a real-life analog of Beals' character.)

And while I don't expect TV cop dramas to be faithfully realistic, some of the situations and dialogue in The Chicago Code make it tough to suspend disbelief even within its fictional universe. After Wysocki (Clarke) apprehends a fugitive who had aimed a gun at him and his partner during a car chase, for example, he lets the guy loose so that he can walk over to his pregnant girlfriend and propose marriage. When Colvin tries to assign him to investigate a politically sensitive murder, he responds in a way that betrays little respect for her authority, which no leader of an organization that relies upon military-style discipline could ever allow, even from her old partner.

And bizarrely, the thugs doing the dirty work for Gibbons (Lindo) turn out to be Irish mobsters, whom I suspect were last a force in Chicago during the gaslight-era reign of Mike "King" McDonald, who coined the aphorism "There's a sucker born every minute." (Here's an interesting article by Chicago Sun-Times crime reporter Steve Warmbir on all the things The Chicago Code gets wrong about the city.)

I'm hoping that The Chicago Code (Mondays, 9 pm Eastern) improves, mostly because I still like the idea of a show built around a powerful, resourceful middle-aged woman protagonist. Maybe the writing will get better, and I'm hopeful that Beals, who's had too few chances to play challenging roles, will grow into her portrayal. Maybe Lindo, who's capable of great things (his sizzling portrayal of a bipolar Caribbean mob boss in Spike Lee's Malcolm X is evidence of that), will steal the show. But I'll just have to watch a few more episodes and see.