Penny Dreadful: City of Angels

Penny Dreadful:  City of Angels is ten-episode series premiered on Showtime in April 2020.  The show is a spin-off of an Anglo-American program also named Penny Dreadful broadcast for three-years in 2014, 2015, and 2017.  (The British shows were set in Victorian London and involved werewolves, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, vampires, Frankenstein and, even, Dorian Grey.)  I haven't see the British series.  The plotting and character development is similar to Babylon Berlin -- a large cast of characters with regenerating sub-plots tacked onto an over-arching story.  These shows all rely upon an atmospheric and detailed recreation of a past era, focusing on a single metropolitan setting -- Berlin itself is a character in Babylon Berlin; similarly Los Angeles in 1938 is lovingly invoked in the American series.  Lavishly detailed and accurate historical reconstruction, rife with carefully researched period allusions, provide a backdrop for lurid and gruesome plots and subplots.  The filmmakers, it seem, try to borrow conviction from their meticulous scene-setting, importing that element of truthfulness into narratives that don't otherwise make much sense and that strain credulity in all sorts of ways.  I had thought that Babylon Berlin was the prototype for City of Angels.  But, based on chronology, it seems to me that the German show likely derived from the first series of Penny Dreadful involving foggy London and its monsters.  

By my count there are about six plots developing simultaneously in City of Angels:  an amoral and childish whiz-kid works out computations that might be used to develop deadly weapons of mass destruction (Nazi agents are trying to kidnap him); a Chicano man joins the LA police force as the first Mexican-American officer, encounters racism, and forms an alliance with his partner, an aging Jew to combat the Nazis that have infiltrated LA government; a spooky German immigrant woman with her vicious son seduces a German dentist, moves into his household, and clashes with the virtuous Mexican-American housekeeper (who happens to be the mother of the Chicano cop); a gang of Pachucos led by a ferocious female criminal plot riots intended to trigger a race war; a man who has engaged in a love affair with a prominent, psychologically troubled radio evangelist is mysteriously murdered along with his whole family; the troubled radio evangelist who is blonde and beautiful falls in love with the Mexican cop, despite opposition of their families; a corrupt City Councilman, who is having a homosexual affair with a Nazi "blonde beast" assassin, plots to route a freeway directly through the Latino barrio -- his machinations are aided by (you guessed it!) Nazis; the cops pin the murders of the family on a hapless Chicano kid who is lynched with a resulting race riot in which the German dentist's child is injured -- this inspires the dentist's sinister mistress to urge him to become a Nazi himself, but the dentist, who is an heir to the Krupp arms and ordinance fortune resists meanwhile the troubled evangelist commits suicide and the city burns down in riots and, the next morning, wrecking balls and bulldozers knock down the Barrio.  

All of this material is more or less derivative:  there is a minor subplot involving the horrible torture-murder of a little girl that is redolent of the Black Dahlia killing that drives the plot of LA Confidential; the troubled evangelist is based Aimee Semple Macpherson and invokes Elmer Gantry and other similar  films; the narrative involving the route of the freeway, involving the homosexual councilman and his vicious plutocrat father, is modeled on Chinatown.  Chinatown, of course, was based on The Big Sleep and, so, the show is ultimately rooted in crime dramas from the fifties, including JackWebb's Dragnet -- the Courthouse tower in central LA is a key feature in the landscape.  There are several lavish song-and-dance numbers involving dozens of jitter-bugging dancers -- these scenes are derived from the cabaret numbers in Babylon Berlin.  Episodes, often, end with music playing over simultaneous and intercut scenes of violence or poignant encounters, lovers meeting and parting.  Everything in this stew is rehashed and dished out with liberal servings of violence and gore.  The two most interesting features in the show are its casting and mythology.  Three female villains are played by one actress, Natalie Dormer -- she has odd bulging eyes and the show wants you to admire the performer's versatility in these parts (there's also some kind of supernatural explanation -- the three lady-villains are all manifestations of some kind of demon:  Dormer plays the witchy German homewrecker who demands that her lover become a Nazi; she also acts the part of the female Pachuco  gangleader who incites the climactic riot; finally, she plays the mousy but, nonetheless, domineering administrative assistant to the evil city councilman.  Overarching all the subplots is a symbolic figure, Sancta Muerta --"Saint Death" who looks like a deranged version of the Virgin of Guadalupe and shows up just before the mayhem begins.  Implausibly, the kindly housekeeper at the German dentist's house (the mother of the Mexican cop) is a devotee to Sancta Muerta although she is also, of course, supposed to be a good and pious Catholic.  

The show doesn't know whether it is supposed to be high-proof "camp" or some kind of serious crime drama.  The characters are all ambiguous -- in this respect, there's an adult aspect to the series.  The evil city councilman also is a pathetic fat man who just wants to be loved -- he practices dance routines alone in his office.  The German dentist turns out to be a pacifist, although he's also an Iron-Cross-decorated Krupp.  The Jewish cop, who traffics in cliches and is supposed to be the central source of wisdom in the show, also frames suspects and commits a cold-blooded murder.  The brassy radio evangelist is really a wounded, suicidal victim of her domineering mother who, in turn,  is suffering from some combination of religious mania and psychosis due to her four miscarriages before she gave birth to the little girl who was raised in revival tents.  Everyone is given a mix of motives, and, although this is shallow and, often, not too credible, the show wants its characters to be rife with indecision, flawed, and acting on ambiguous and, often, questionable motives.  A problem, of course, is that this complexity in characterization is entrapped in a series of narratives that involve very primitive conflicts that are worked out through a combination of violence, melodramatic speechifying, and torture.  Some of the speeches are bizarre -- the corpulent city councilman proclaims the future as belonging to fat men, notable Mussolini and Hitler (who I don't recall as being fat at all) and that the reign of the autocratic fat men will be a "thousand year Reich."  Shows that trot out Nazis as  villains are always suspect -- the presence of Nazis radically simplifies plots into pure good and pure evil and this, in turn, cuts against the grain of ambiguity in the characters.

City of Angels is handsomely produced with big riot scenes and elaborately choreographed dance numbers.   The last episode has been manipulated to provide commentary as to our state of affairs in the early summer of 2020 -- the immigrant barrio is destroyed, a series of George Floyd-style protests turn violent, and the Latino cop says that the government is using freeways as cordons, walling off ethnic groups -- "we're putting up walls everywhere," the hero says.  The show is a somewhat offensive but I bought into it enough to watch all ten episodes.