I Begin a Look Through Backstrom, a One Season Wonder Where Rainn Wilson Plays a Self-Destructive Detective Genius Like All the Others
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I have written about a fair number of television programs for this column: Batman Beyond, Freakazoid, Red Dwarf, and the first season of True Detective, to name just a few. They have overwhelmingly been funky cult TV shows that I have adored.
In addition to Red Dwarf, I will be writing about Vinyl and Backstrom for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. If the first episode is any indication, Backstrom will not count among the winners I have discovered and celebrated for the column that lets you, the kind-hearted Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, choose what I watch and write about.
I haven’t watched many police procedurals, or at least I haven’t for a very long time. I used to watch a lot of television, but I’ve forgotten a lot of what I watched. My brain quite rightly did not consider that important information worth saving, so I will never conclusively know for sure whether I’ve watched an entire season of NYPD Blue, for example.
Backstrom is a crime fighter played by an unbecomingly smug Rainn Wilson who breaks all the rules and challenges conventions in a show that follows all the rules and is extremely conventional and cliched.
I can see why Wilson wanted to play the title character: he is pretty darn outrageous.
As a thought experiment, I want you to think up a detective using your imagination. He’s probably impeccably dressed in expensive designer clothes and refrains from boozing it up because his body is a temple, and he is all too familiar with the deleterious effects of excessive alcohol consumption, right?
That’s not Backstrom. AT ALL! This rascal looks like he SLEEPS in clothes that he steals from the donation box at Goodwill and LOVES to drink alcohol! He’s all glug, glug, glug, getting inebriated is the best! He’s a real degenerate boozer, that Backstrom!
He’s a rummy, is what he is! He’s a homeless-looking drunk who looks like he should be pushing a cart with all his belongings in it through a city park rather than using an Einsten-level intellect to solve crimes that bewilder normies and rule-followers.
You do NOT want Backstrom to look at you that way! You just don't.
In your mind, the detective you’ve dreamed up is highly sensitive to issues like race, gender, and sexuality. He’s probably “Woke” and politically correct in the way that he always strives to use language that does not betray cultural biases or pre-existing beliefs, no?
That’s not Backstrom. He’s not politically correct; he’s politically incorrect. He’s constantly saying all of the horrible, racist, sexist things we all feel deeply but are afraid to say out loud for fear of being rightly accused of bigotry.
But here’s the thing: his racism is hilarious. At least the show feels that it is. For example, being a super-genius from beyond on the grave, Backstrom found the serial killer of Native Americans but used some guffaw-inducing “incorrect” language and was bumped down to traffic duty.
You probably assume that the show’s protagonist would never pollute his precious lungs by smoking. You couldn’t even envision him puffing away in scene after on a cigar, the official accessory of 19th-century robber barons and garden-variety douchebags.
You’d once again be wrong. Our boy LOVES to puff away on a stogie like a rich asshole or bro at poker night.
Jesus, you’re not very good at this, are you? In that respect, you’re unlike Backstrom, whose methods are unconventional, but he gets results, dammit! This is an exciting, unprecedented dynamic for a police procedural show.
The powers that be don’t like Backstrom’s personality but they like him cracking all the cases when not attending to his many vices.
In the pilot, the brilliant detective with an irreverent personal style investigates the staged suicide of a collegiate son of a liberal Senator found hanging on a long rope after being stabbed full of a fatal dose of heroin.
Backstrom is purposefully abrasive in his personal manner. He loves saying provocative things to provoke a response from his more straight-laced and buttoned-up colleagues.
Yet he’s treated with deference by these same coworkers because they, and the show, are in awe of Backstrom’s intellect and the fact that he gets results, dammit.
Did I mention the part about results? He gets ‘em! Genevieve Angelson plays Detective Sergeant Nicole Gravely, Backstrom’s second in command and attitudinal opposite. She’s the yin to his yang, an inveterate rule-follower perpetually apoplectic about his rough edges.
He is ALL rough edges. He’s a rough dude. You’d think that someone so brilliant and unconventional would be doing crimes and making money. Let’s just say it’s good we’ve got him working for us!
Ah, but who is this Backstrom? What’s his backstory? This isn’t a novel, like the books that inspired it, so we can’t have the author deliver that information artfully.
Instead, we have a colleague of Backstrom tell him that Backstrom’s dad was a sheriff with a sterling reputation within the police department, and that’s why he’s spent his adult life rebelling against him through casual self-destructiveness and counter-productive behavior.
Backstrom then corrects the awed copper by telling him that his dad actually pistol-whipped him when he was a child. The unconventional shamus then shows him the scar.
I’m guessing that Backstrom already knew that his father was a sheriff with a big reputation on the force. He probably remembered that from his childhood, his adolescence, his teen years, or his adulthood. You tend not to forget stuff like that, yet this man still felt the need to remind him who his father is and what he’s done.
Backstrom’s instincts lead him to the victim’s star-crossed relationship with his black stripper girlfriend and her drug dealer boyfriend and the seedy underbelly of the college world.
Early in the episode, an Indian doctor played by Schitt’s Creek Rizwan Manji that Backstrom peppers with hilariously racist one-liners and wisecracks tells him to let up on the drinking and smoking on account of it literally killing him. Instead of medication, he makes out a prescription for Backstrom to make a new friend.
Despite being ostentatiously anti-social and a proudly disagreeable sort, he seems to have, at the very least, several friendly acquaintances, like a gay tenant played by Thomas Dekker, who is also professionally useful because he fences stolen goods and is an informant and a beautiful European woman plays chess with and may or may not employ as a sex worker.
That’s another racy element of Mr. Backstrom: despite prostitution being illegal and his job enforcing laws, he enjoys the company of sex workers the same way that he loves to drink and smoke and say mildly racist things.
Backstrom embodies a deathless pop culture archetype: the detective who is as brilliant as he is troubled, and he is very brilliant.
He’s a shaggy American Sherlock Holmes with attitude, House without a medical degree, a crank who acts superior to everybody and like he has all the answers because he is superior to everybody else and he does have all the answers.
Backstrom seems very impressed with its anti-hero and itself. It pats itself on the back for breaking all the rules without actually breaking any rules. It does, in fact, slavishly follow the many rules for movies and television books about crime fighters separated from the rest of humanity by their prickly personalities/probably undiagnosed and treated neurodivergence but blessed with incredible powers of observation and deduction.
I was extremely, aggressively not impressed with Backstrom. Wilson’s smug performance as Unconventional Genius Detective 4327th is the show, and I was annoyed rather than amused by it.
Wilson gets a lifetime pass from me for his masterful performance as Dr. Demento in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Now, THAT was a remarkable performance about a truly unique and impressive human being. In sharp contrast, Wilson’s turn in Backstrom is just a bunch of smirky nonsense.
Will Backstrom get better? Will it win me over? I don’t know. I’m guessing that it won’t, but it’s a painless way to spend fifty minutes, and it’s interesting sometimes to experience pop culture that you’d never even think about consuming if you weren’t professionally obligated to do so.
If nothing else, Robert Forster plays Wilson’s dad for what hopefully is a substantial role. So I have that to look forward to, which may not be much, but it is something.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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