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My favorite television shows are ensemble dramas, and, if one appeals to me, I'll spend hours with its cast of characters over multiple seasons. Over time, I'll figure out what makes the characters tick and learn their strengths and weaknesses. In short, I bond.
The downside of bonding becomes clear when one of my must-see show ends and familiar actors turn up in different shows with different personas. Confusing! Disorienting! Yes, I know there's a difference between reality and play-acting, but surely I'm not alone in blurring the line.
If you watched
The Wire, an HBO series now immortalized on DVD, you spent hours with the ensemble cast and thought you knew them. Actor Idris Elba will always be bad guy Stringer Bell to me, and I marvel at the mother-of-all-redemptions that brought him back as a police detective in
Luther, a British series on BBC America.
Jimmy McNulty, the disheveled, blue-collar cop at the core of
The Wire now plays a suave, 1950's-era newscaster in the British series
The Hour, also on BBC America. Actor Dominic West made Jimmy McNulty suave? Is that a Hamsterdam-fueled hallucination? Detective Bunk Moreland, aka actor Wendell Pierce, left Baltimore for New Orleans and now plays a trombonist in
Treme. Huh? I didn't know Bunk played an instrument. Detective Lester Freamon, played by actor Clarke Peters, also turned up in
Treme playing bass and serving as Big Chief of a tribe of Mardi Gras Indians. Remember Detective Kima Greggs? Sonja Sohn is still detecting but does it without the Ballmer edge in
Body of Proof.
Dillon, Texas is the fictional setting for gone-but-not-forgotten
Friday Night Lights, and I like to think the Panthers and Lions are still playing football there. Imagine my surprise to learn Tami Taylor has up and left Coach Eric to appear in a new show,
American Horror Story. I wish actress Connie Britton well, but horror? Glazed eyes, pierced hearts, can't win. In a recent interview, Britton said the new show attracted her because it's about relationships and making a marriage work. If that doesn't sound like Tami, I don't know what does.
In a redemption almost as startling as Stringer Bell's,
The Wire's Wallace, a young drug dealer who made sure the kids he watched over had food and went to school, was killed and reappeared in Dillon as quarterback Vince Howard. Fans of both shows got to see the young-man-formerly-known-as-Wallace mature and reach for his potential on
Friday Night Lights. Actor Michael B. Jordan made both Wallace and Vince tough, vulnerable, and unforgettable.
In FNL, actor Scott Porter played football hero-turned-paraplegic Jason Street. Later, when he turned up as a creepy investigator on
The Good Wife, his ability to walk restored, I knew he'd made a deal with the devil. Matt Lauria, who played quarterback Luke Cafferty, didn't join the Army as FNL would have had us believe. No, he left Dillon to be a homicide cop in
Chicago Code. The list goes on. The other night I spotted the Billy Riggins character from FNL in a cameo role elsewhere. Clearly, he'd gotten his act together, and I caught myself giving credit to Mindy, Tim, and the twins for Billy's transformation.
Sigh.
Writers who create believable characters and the actors who inhabit those characters deserve viewers who can imagine themselves in a Baltimore or Dillon--for the length of an episode, anyway.
Some of us stay longer.
What television-show locale is real to you? When an actor you thought you knew turns up in a different role, how do you react?