A Return to the Status Quo

White Collar absolutely overestimates just how attached we can get to characters we barely know. We like Neal and Peter because they’re played by charismatic actors and the show has spent a lot of time working on their stories. The very first episode of the series has a solid hook – Neal helps Peter solve one case so that, in turn, he can then get a work-release so he can help solve more cases – and the show builds from there. Everyone else that has been introduced and stuck around has been given the time to grow as new characters. But it’s telling that barely anyone that has come along since the first season has had the staying power to make a real impression.

Sarah Ellis is probably the closest we’ve gotten to a new, long term character. The insurance adjuster that wanted to catch Neal and get back treasures that he stole was an instant hit with fans, such that for the third season she became not only his primary love interest but also a regular on the series. But then she’s been shoved back to being just a recurring character for the fourth season and (spoilers because I’ve watched through this series once before) she leaves after this fourth season, never to be seen again. Everyone else we care about came out somewhere in the first season, and no one they’ve brought in since has been as interesting or impactful.

It’s so strange, then, that the show just expects us to develop an instant connection with Ellen Parker (Judith Ivey), introduced right at the end of the third season as Neal’s fathers old partner on the force, and Sam Phelps (Treat Williams), a supposed former contact Ellen had with the police. These characters are shoved on us to immediately push a plotline about the sins of Neal’s father and the corrupt former cop turned current senator, Terrance Pratt (Titus Welliver), who framed him for murder. The show thinks because Neal cares we’ll care but, well, we don’t.

Part of the issue is that, yes, we don’t know these people. If you want us to care about Ellen then you have to develop her not just across five episodes (which is all she gets in the third and fourth seasons) but the previous three years. When the show does a plotline about Mozzie we care because we’ve gotten to know him for three full seasons and we’re invested in him. He’s a regular. He gets plenty of scenes each episode. He matters. When Ellen is shot and killed early in the fourth season, we have no investment in it because we’ve barely seen her at all. She’s had maybe fifteen minutes of screen time, doling out cryptic information about Neal’s father, and then she’s shot so that the central mystery of the season has “stakes”. It just doesn’t work.

This, of course, speaks to the long term, inherent problem of White Collar: its formula. The show, as we’ve discussed before, is engineered to have long-form, season by season arcs, but it’s also a case-of-the-week, buddy comedy, cop show. The two parts don’t mesh well together. The show wants us to invest heavily in the central mystery each season, but then it spends ninety percent of its time focusing on the police procedural matters which, more often than not, have nothing to do with the overarching mystery. Are we supposed to care about some plotline that won’t really get moving, or resolve itself, until the end of the season when there’s cool cases to solve right now? Nope, not gonna happen.

The way to build a plotline like this, if you want to set it up and resolve it all in a single season, is to make the overarching story the A-plot of the season. When you compare White Collar to the likes of Buffy, you can clearly see the difference. Yes, Buffy had episodes that didn’t focus on the main storyline, and those episodes only featured the “big bads” in B- or C-plot scenes, but it then spent more than half the season actually working on those same “big bads” so that we actually became interested in them and cared about them as villains. Much of the arc of the season was about whatever villainous plan the bads had (and you could tell the seasons that didn’t work because there wasn’t enough meat to the villains for them to carry their seasons).

White Collar, though, doesn’t have that structure. It’s police procedural first, overarching story second throughout. You might get two episodes in a season focused on the big story, but those are there so that the show can resolve the storyline it set up and then largely ignored for the rest of the season. You hardly can get invested in a story that comes out in five minute chunks across thirteen episodes. The structure doesn’t work and, season after season, it lets the storyline down. It’s why we barely connected with Kate, why we didn’t care about Vincent Adler, and why we can’t connect with Ellen and Sam here. They simply don’t matter to us because they barely matter to the show.

The best overarching story the show has produced was during the third season, when Neal and Mozzie had the treasure and they had to find a way to try and keep it and not get caught. The reason why we cared, of course, is because it was a Neal and Mozzie storyline. We like these guys, we know these guys. Putting the focus on them gives us an attachment to the story. If it had been a plotline about, say, Alex having the treasure and Neal had to try and keep the FBI away from her we’d care much less because Alex is a character who only appeared in nine episodes over the whole series. We know her but we haven’t spent enough time with her to care what happens to her.

The idea of Neal learning the secrets about his father is interesting in theory. I get that it’s supposed to somehow give us insight into Neal because we’re exploring his past. The show doesn’t really know how to develop that, though, in part because Neal barely has a connection to his father as it stands and, at this point, Neal is already such a well developed, fleshed out, interesting character that delving into his past doesn’t really develop anything new about him that we didn’t already know. It’s a story meant to give insight without any actual insight to give.

As a side note, the inciting incident, Ellen getting shot, is also just a bad story beat. Setting aside the fact that the show effectively “fridges” her to motivate Neal and his story, there’s also the fact that, when we meet her, Ellen is in witness protection. For her murder to happen she has to first reconnect with Neal, get moved to a different part of New York, meet Neal again, stick around that spot for weeks (despite being in witness protection) and then get shot when no one is looking. There is no way that the U.S. Marshals let Ellen stick around in New York City the first time, after Neal first finds her, let alone then keeping her there for weeks after her cover is blown a second time. Of course she’s shot; on the show the Marshals are depicted as being incompetent at what is, effectively, their one job.

All of this is to say that this plotline just doesn’t work. I’ve made a lot of excuses for White Collar, season after season, because I like the procedural side of the story. Four seasons in, though, the show is starting to feel long in the tooth, and the lackluster arcs they mire the characters in aren’t helping. If the show can’t stick the second half of this fourth season, it’ll be hard for me to push through and keep binging this show. As it stands, I’ve had to take a few weeks before I could get back and write this review, and my gut is telling me it’s only going to get worse from here.