All that's left is vices torn....

A guy I enjoy bullshitting with at work was telling me excitedly about a new show he'd seen advertised, called White Collar, which seemed to be about an FBI agent and some sort of master criminal whom he arrested then sprung from jail to help catch even bigger criminals. The reason the guy was excited about this show is that he and I are perhaps the world's foremost living Hardcastle & McCormick fans and the plot sounded, to him, similar. I made approving noises while sipping a cup of Twinings Lady Grey, as is my custom, but when I looked into the show later I found a number of reasons for pessimism.

First, the premise of White Collar seems to be that the world's greatest rogue conman, a guy with male model looks and the charisma of Felix Krull*, is teaming up with the FBI's answer to Inspector Morse to solve crimes. This immediately flies in the face of what may have been H&C's greatest charm--the glaring mediocrity of both main characters. Judge Hardcastle, based on the sheer number of convictions he seems to have had overturned ,wasn't a shining star on the California state bench. Similarly, McCormick's only real skill was how shamelessly he was able to strut around with a perm and a pair of tight 501s. They teamed up to catch equally mediocre criminals who might have been fine if they'd limited their activities to selling bags of oregano to high school kids or shaking things loose from vending machines, but who inexplicably thought they could run international drug rings and orchestrate high ticket art thefts instead. Two idiots driving around in a powerful red car while the Reagan era silently collapses around them is entertaining--this sounds more like a wholly unsatisfying cover version, perhaps the Goodwill Hunting to Hardcastle and McCormick's Real Genius.

The other problem that immediately presents itself is the presence of Tiffany Amber Thiessen in White Collar. Amber Tiffany Thiessen? Tiffany Amber Dawn Marie Thiessen? I can never remember. She plays the FBI agent's wife.

Now I'm okay with the fact that Zach Morris's ex has moved on. I'm sure Zach was no picnic to live with when he got older, espeically not once he became Andy "The Widowmaker" Sipowicz's partner on the NYPD. Smug preppies don't always age well. I picture Zach Morris, Ferris Bueller, and Parker Lewis all sitting around the bar at some TGI Friday's in, say, Shaker Heights, around closing time, munching on mozzarella sticks and stinking of Aramis, trying desperately to pick up a waitress in a pair of red high tops who just wants to get home and watch The Vampire Diaries.**

So it's fine that she moved on, but the problem is, the existence of a wife fucks up the whole dynamic. A large part of the unstated humor of H&C derived from the fact that you have this elderly, ultra rightwing judge, a widower, living in his hilltop mansion with a roguish young ex-con sporting a perm, tight jeans, and a rakish grin. Questions were bound to have arisen, Espeically in aftermath of the Roy Cohn era. Let's just leave it at that.

They've taken away the bumbling. The powerful red car. The implications of a homosexual scandal involving a former Conservative judge and his ex-con companion. There's really nothing left.

So that's why this television show I've never seen is nothing like Hardcastle and McCormick, which it never actually claimed, so far as I know, to be in the first place. Notch another one in the win column. Quod erat demonstrandum, baby.

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* Vain as a peacock with all the mannerisms of a petit maitre, as David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford, once described Anthony Eden.

** Now that's a movie I'd pay to see, particularly if Dennis Haskins reprised his role as Principal Belding, who has since retired from the fast paced world of secondary education to spend his golden years as the weekend bartender at the aforementioned TGI Friday's.