The Con Man and the G-Man

The police procedural is a well-worn format. It predates TV, and radio, and film, dating all the way back to the 1860s. Of course, it evolved over time, finding its true recurring format in the likes of Dragnet (both on radio and then TV), The Untouchables, and Adam-12. It’s a format that has stayed enduring, with more police procedurals produced every year, for every channel and streaming network. And it makes sense, as these are reliable comfort food for audiences, stories that don’t take a lot of brain power to follow so you can enjoy it as you veg on the couch. Plus, they’re cheap to produce, making them ideal fodder for networks.

That explains why even smaller cable networks have tried their hand at the procedural. From 2009 to 2014, for example, USA network aired White Collar, a procedural that paired up a fairly straight-laced FBI agent with a casually cool con-man, forger, and all around credible criminal so they could solve crimes together. It’s an Odd Couple pairing mixed with the foundational format of the procedural but, also, it worked really well. A reliable hit, White Collar managed to bring in two-to-three million across its 6 seasons, only finally dipping below that number for its last, short run of six-episodes. It was steady, fun, and the kind of easy televisual comfort food people crave.

White Collar starred Matt Bomer as Neal Caffrey, an art forger and con-man extraordinaire who finds a way to escape from prison mere weeks before the end of his four year stint in the slammer. The FBI agent who captured him originally, Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) is called in to investigate. Why would Caffrey escape when he was so close to getting out legitimately, it just doesn’t make sense. Burke knows Caffrey better than anyone, he knows how the guy thinks and what he’d do, so he traces the con-man back to the apartment Caffrey used to share with his girlfriend, Kate Moreau (Alexandra Daddario), and finds him there, holding onto an empty bottle, realizing it’s a message from Kate saying it’s over.

However, as Peter collects Neal to take him back to prison, Neal finds a red thread on the agent’s suit. The thread came from another case, and is actually a security measure for a new Canadian bill, perfect for counterfeiting. With that one thread, Neal is able to convince Burke (with a little time) to let him work for the FBI as a consultant, released into the custody of the FBI so that he can share his knowledge and skills to help Peter’s team investigating White Collar crimes around the New York City area.

The setup is simple enough, and in fact I’d argue that as soon as the show is set with the concept it more or less ignores the initial case that got the show movie. That red thread, which comes from another case that Burke is investigating, never comes up afterwards. That first episode, “Pilot”, is actually about the crook they’re chasing making a forged Spanish war bond, and the red thread has nothing to do with it at all. Sure, that could have been something else that the criminal had aside, but it’s one of those things where you don’t introduce an element to the show if you aren’t going to have it pay off in a big way later. The thread is a nice little thing that Neal can use to prove his skill, and how he helps Peter with the bond case is impressive, but it would have been nice for one to lead to the other, like a like of clues (or, some might say, a thread of them).

I think that’s an issue the show sometimes has: it can be a little sloppy with its set up and execution. There are times where the show brings in some element, a clue, or a character, or a plot device, and then it dismisses it just as easily, sometimes off hand even when, before a commercial break, this one element was so vital to the case that you couldn’t possibly imagine it being inconsequential. Sometimes it’s Neal flirting with a woman to get a line on a case, and then as soon as he’s done the woman is forgotten. Other times it’s like that red thread, a vital bit of info to get them moving and then, suddenly, the case takes another turn and the starting clue no longer matters. It’s not every episode that does this but it was just often enough that I noticed. It was the first half of the first season and the show needed to get its feet. I get that. But it still stuck out.

What also stuck out was a shameless moment of car advertising right in the middle of an episode. Burke and Caffrey get into a car and immediately have to go on about one feature or another that the car has. This was clearly so the show could get extra money and some suits could line their pockets a little more. I get the reality of show business. But these moments are so ham-fisted, and so poorly written, that they don’t feel natural. When a show does this, in this way, it always pulls me out of the moment (not everyone can handle it as well as Community and Honda). These are the moments where it stops being a fun, buddy-cop adventure and goes back to just being a TV show.

Outside these weak moments, though, the show is honestly really good. It gets a lot of mileage out of the Odd Couple-esque pairing of Burke and Caffrey. Burke is the fairly straight-laced FBI agent who is perfectly happy with his basic suits, his cheaper watch, his basic coffee. He knows the finer things in life exist, he’s seen criminals steal most of them, but he’s happy living within his means and enjoying a life he can afford that’s comfortable. Comfort is key for him, and he doesn’t need or want more than that.

And then there’s Caffrey, who loves the high-class, high-flying lifestyle. He’s a classy guy with refined tastes, and he is always enjoying the fruits of the upper crust. In the first episode alone he manages to get in good with a rich widow and moves into her spare room, a massive upgrade over the fleabag motel the FBI was going to put him in. The widow, June Ellington (Diahann Carroll), also lets Neal have his pick of her late husband’s suits and other accoutrement, dressing up nice and getting his suave bit of spit and polish going. This is how he likes to be: classy, refined, elegant, suave. A perfect contrast for Burke.

The chemistry between the two actors works, making a clear friendship for them even before the show actually starts having the characters acknowledge it. These are two men that, for years, were in a game of cat-and-mouse. Burke learned everything he could about Caffrey and came to respect the art forger. Meanwhile, Caffrey likewise learned all he could about Burke, including his birthday (so he could send him birthday cards). Caffrey isn’t a violent criminal (in fact he even hates guns altogether) and he has a ton of respect for the work the agent does. He just also liked the game and didn’t want to go to prison.

The cases themselves aren’t anything super special most of the time. They’re twenty-to-twenty five minutes of plot put in for a case of the week while the characters hang out, make jokes, and enjoy the work. It’s a procedural, meant to be picked up randomly during its broadcast and weekly reruns, something you can watch and enjoy without having to invest too heavily. That’s how the show works at its best and it doesn’t really need more than that. In fact, its few feints at serialization feel out of place within the context of the show.

The first season (which we are only halfway into) features the story of Kate, who is either on the run from a mysterious man or being controlled by him. Neal thinks Kate broke up with him to protect him, but he won’t let it go. So every episode we get a scene or two of Neal discussing the Kate case with his friend, Mozzie (Willie Garson). It’s so long, and dragged out, and feels like it’s going nowhere that it frankly feels like the creators didn’t have a plan for the Kate story and were just throwing in crumbs to try and keep people interested until they actually figured out the story. It doesn’t work.

And worse, the first half of the first season ends with such a dumb cliffhanger. After Neal finds a picture of Kate with a man’s hand on her shoulder, that man wearing a very specific ring, Neal assumes that’s the man controlling her. Then, to close out the season, we get a scene of Burke meeting Kate, and Burke is wearing that ring. He’s the man at the center of the conspiracy? Well, no. Of course not. This show went for six seasons with Neal and Burke as the leads, so clearly this was just a bait-and-switch to try and keep people hooked for the back half of episodes (which came out a month later; future breaks between season halves would be even longer). It was just deception.

That’s the part of the show I like the least, the part where it toys with the audience to try and keep them engaged. We’re already engaged, though. We like the characters, we like the actors, and the basic case-of-the-week formula works. If the show could have just been these two opposite men working on White Collar cases, that was all we needed. Everything else was fluff, manufactured to the point where it didn’t need to be there at all.