I have not felt like watching anything serious for the last couples of weeks, so what did I decide to do instead? I am watching Due South for the first time since it was airing! The show was my family's favorite when I was a kid, and I have memories of the characters and the vibes, but I have zero memory of the details. It's been really fun revisiting it and I am currently ten episodes in.
Is this show good? Not by any objective standard. Is it profoundly silly? It sure is! But y'all, I love Benton Fraser so much. As a child, I imprinted on him like a little baby ducking, and my affection is even more intense now. He's such a doof! And so good! I love men who are just so good! He's like Clark Kent if Clark Kent was even more of a loser and also Canadian and also had a deaf wolf as a pet.
I also do love RayV a whole whole lot and I am thoroughly enjoying these episodes even if I am looking forward to season 3 and the shippy goodness.
For those who are not aware of this Canadian cop show from the 90s, it started off as a one-off TV movie in which Paul Gross is Benton Fraser, a Mountie whose Mountie father gets murdered and he has to track down the murderers in Chicago. While there he meets Ray Vecchio, who is a central casting Italian-American cop and very funny. They have a typical odd couple partnership, and end up uncovering a big conspiracy back in Canada that implicates so many powerful people that Fraser pretty much has to just to get out of the country for a while, so he goes back to Canada, where he works at the consulate and solves ridiculous crimes with his deaf wolf Diefenbaker and with RayV.
However! In season 3, RayV leaves the show (for reasons I'm not clear on) and who do we get instead? A very young Callum Keith Rennie as Ray Kowalsky (RayK) who has ridiculously good chemistry with Gross. Ostensibly the show doesn't change--it's still overly earnest Mountie solves crimes with streetwise Chicago cop--but the dynamic is completely different. Fraser and RayV are buddies and such fun together and they love each other a lot, but Fraser and RayK are major slashbait. Like one of the great Western TV slash ships a la Starsky and Hutch and the Man from UNCLE dudes. And once I get to their seasons, I am going to need all the fic recs, especially the stuff that was written in the 90s and early 2000s.
As I said, despite its extreme silliness, I am having a lot of fun. The show (so far) has aged incredibly well in that Fraser's whole thing is that he believes in people who are written off by everyone else, so in the first few episodes, we get him standing up for a Black boy with a criminal record, a Latina immigrant mother whose children get taken away from her, a working class white guy single father who is involved in an insurance scam, a Chinese immigrant man whose son is being targeted by organized crime, and a white kid who's just out of juvie and is trying to turn his life around. Fraser is like, "This person is in difficult circumstances and is either innocent or is being coerced into something they don't want to do, and if we give them a chance, they will do the right thing." AND HE IS ALWAYS RIGHT.
He chooses to live in a really "bad" area of town because it allows him to walk to work (which probably doesn't make sense from an actual-geography-of-Chicago perspective but who cares?) and while we get lots of jokes about crime, in actuality, we end up seeing that the people who live in this neighborhood are just people who are struggling.
I love it so much. I truly feel if this show was airing today, it would be hated by conservatives and decried as too woke.
This all ends up softening the fact that this show is a cop show. It doesn't feel like copaganda in the way most cop shows do, which is probably why I can enjoy it so much.
It's full of 90s music--I keep getting surprised by the songs they include. Is that Tracy Chapman? It sure is! Is that Sarah McLachlan? Hey, it's the 90's! (Honestly there's so much Sarah McLachlan. Omg they're actually playing the Crash Test Dummies' "Superman"? Of course they are! My jaw absolutely dropped when I recognized Loreena McKennitt! I mean, I wasn't that surprised her music was included because it's a Canadian show from the 90s, and that was certainly her heyday, but I was gobsmacked that the song in question was "Prospero's Speech" and not one of her more familiar songs.
Honestly, the 90s music and fashion and just general vibes are making me so nostalgic. I know that the 90s were not that great for everyone, but I was a child then, so it makes sense that it feels like a simpler time to me. This is what the world is supposed to look like! Because it's the world I got used to as a child! It's really nice to reivist it in this way.
The one thing that kind of annoys me is the women thing. The truly main cast is just Fraser, his wolf, and whichever Ray he's working with at the moment. But there's also the people back at Ray's precinct office--his male boss, his two annoying male coworkers, and the very competent lady cop who actually does most of the work. I like Elaine a lot! But she develops a crush on Fraser at the beginning and that kind of becomes her thing? Besides being competent? I am hoping she'll get other things to do as the show carries on.
Honestly, too many of the women in the show fall in love with Fraser. And on the one hand, I can certainly understand this! I am also in love with Fraser! He has ruined me for men! He's just so good and so pretty! I like that the show is like, "Actually, despite what some people say, women don't always go for the bad boy--if you give them a really righteous and pretty man, they will fall for him hard." Which I appreciate! But I feel like they push the joke too far.
Because the joke is that Fraser loves and respects women and treats them like actual human beings, but as soon as they start hitting on him or expressing interest in him, he has no idea how to handle it. He's so awkward!
And like, obviously fandom read this as, "Look at this poor gay man who doesn't know how to deal with female romantic/sexual attention." But the show doesn't actually know he's gay, which is hilarious to me because he is so gay. Like, there are a couple of moments so far in which it seems to imply that he might actually be interested in a woman, and I am like, "Give me a break." It's not remotely convincing.
Anyway, it's not a huge complaint because the women who show up (like the immigrant mother or another mother whose boyfriend MARK RUFFALO is trying to sell their baby yes you actually read those words with your own two eyes) are treated respectfully and like real people. It's just the women around the edges who fall for Fraser too easily.
I actually really liked the amoral reporter lady we met in one of the first episodes who isn't in love with Fraser, and I think it would have been really fun if she'd become recurring. She would have been a nice balance for Elaine. But alas! The main cast is male!
The guest stars are wild, though! So many familiar faces! In the first ten episodes, we have been visited by Eric Schweig (Uncas from The Last of the Mohicans, who I am very fond of), Leslie Nielsen (as another mountie), Teri Polo (aka First Lady Helen Santos from The West Wing), baby Mark Ruffalo (okay, he's in his mid-20s, but he looks like a baby to me), and baby Ryan Phillippe (who probably was a teenager at the time). I so look forward to seeing who else pops up!
I imagine the show would be grating for Canadians because Fraser is such a cliche, and a great deal of the humor of the show comes from the contrast between him and his Chicago setting. But I choose to view the show as less "isn't it funny when a Canadian has to navigate Chicago?" and instead "isn't it funny when this very particular individual who has lived in the Yukon his whole life and was raised by his librarian grandparents has to navigate Chicago?"
So yeah, enjoying the show a lot, looking forward to seeing how things develop, and definitely anticipating the future slash of it all!
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