The Glade Hander

One of the TV shows my wife and I are now in the habit of watching regularly is The Glades on A&E. It’s not Shakespeare, but I’m basically a sucker for crime shows, and South Florida is a wonderful place to set one, something Dexter and CSI:Miami have also exploited (Dexter is a great show; we gave up on CSI:Miami a few years and several hundred removals of Horatio’s sunglasses ago).
Which brings me to my rant: Jim Longworth, the main character, is the worst TV detective I have ever seen at questioning witnesses.
Longworth, if you haven’t watched the show, is a transplanted Chicago detective turned FDLE homicide investigator. He’s cocky, good-looking, wise-cracking, irreverent…he has a shtick. Which is a double-edged sword: a detective with a shtick can become a self-parody like Horatio, but at least it’s more entertaining than the colorless parade of no-character characters that a lot of the network police procedurals have turned out over the past decade, while the cable nets like USA have focused on more character-driven shows.
Anyway, it’s not Longworth’s personality that’s an issue, but how it gets in the way of his job. Week after week, he’s faced with the whole menagerie of suspects Florida can serve up: UFO freaks, snake handlers, gun and moonshine runners, stock car racers, high school football boosters, drug kingpins, Ernest Hemingway impersonators, you name it. And he can’t stop himself from sneering judgementally at them – their lifestyles, careers, hobbies, love lives, what have you. While he is questioning them. Which, even when questioning fictional characters, tends to cause them to get their backs up instead of winning their trust. And then he walks off instead of completing his interrogations. In last night’s episode, he literally walked out of an interrogation room while a suspect was shouting, “That’s not how it happened!” Any reasonably competent cop would have sat back down at that point and demanded to know, really, how it did happen.
The predictable result of this – which, granted, helps stretch out the episodes to an hour and keep the viewers guessing – is that everybody lies to him. Just about every witness he questions on the show has to be questioned two, three, four times before he gets their full and honest story. He can occasionally be effective in intimidating people he’s locked up (he generally locks up 1-2 suspects per episode who turn out not to have done it), but not in the spectacular fashion of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Detective Goren or Andre Braugher’s Frank Pembleton. He’s just a guy who has you locked up and maybe has a case against you.
(I’m leaving aside the political content that sometimes creeps in when Longworth is railing against gun shows and the like, which is a separate issue; it’s at least not out of character for a guy from Chicago to have a different, more Jack McCoy view of the world than Floridians)
Now, some TV detectives are interesting because they have character flaws. We used to watch Monk, which at times was an excellent show, and the writers made no bones about the fact that, while Monk was a genius, his various phobias and obsessions sometimes got in the way of doing his job. But the writers of The Glades never give you the impression that they realize that Longworth is doing anything wrong; after all, he does eventually solve all his cases. Sooner or later, they should realize that their main character is bad at one of the principal aspects of his job.