Entertainment
On Fox
‘Chicago Code’ Is Newest Cop Show to Hit Airwaves
NEW YORK--In the 1987 movie, “The Untouchables,” a tale about Chicago crime, cops and corruption penned by Windy City-born playwright David Mamet, a Canadian Mountie involved in a violent liquor raid, says to Al Capone foe Eliot Ness, “I do not approve of your methods!”
Treasury Agent Ness, also a native Chicagoan, fires back, “Yeah, well, you’re not from Chicago.”
Writer/producer Shawn Ryan--who created FX’s “The Shield” and partnered with Mamet for CBS’ “The Unit”--may not be from Chicago proper, but he’s from the northern Illinois city of Rockford, and he’s imbued with a lore of, as poet Carl Sandburg called it, “The City of the Big Shoulders.”
Fox premiered Mr. Ryan’s new drama, “The Chicago Code,” which focuses on a group of Chicago cops, led by the city’s first female superintendent, Teresa Colvin (played by Chicagoan Jennifer Beals), and her cat-and-mouse relationship with a powerful ward politician, Alderman Ronin Gibbons (Delroy Lindo).
Also starring are Jason Clarke as Detective Jarek Wysocki; Matt Lauria as Wysocki’s partner, Caleb Evers; Devin Kelly as rookie beat cop Vonda Wysocki, Jarek’s niece; Todd Williams as Isaac Joiner, Vonda’s partner; and Billy Lush as Irish mob insider Liam Hennessey.
“It’s just a fascinating arena,” Mr. Ryan said. “Having said that, you can look at the that and say, ‘That’s not the way things should work.’ And at the same time the city is just gorgeous. They’ve gone on this explosion of building and construction.
“It really is beautiful, and a lot of things run really, really well.
“It’s the kind of city where things get done. You look at New York City, and the way that there’s still a hole in the ground at the World Trade Center--they wouldn’t let that happen in Chicago.
“In Chicago, that stuff would be rebuilt by now.”
But just how that stuff would be built--how the permits would be obtained, the financing, the labor, the land, etc.--is open for discussion.
If you watch “The Untouchables,” you can see a smiling alderman offer a bribe to Ness, who empathetically rejects it.
“How about that?” Mr. Lindo said. “Certainly when they came to me with the offer to do this, the idea of playing a Chicago alderman was interesting, a knowing a little about that history.”
“The ‘Chicago code’ itself,” said Mr. Ryan, “is that the city is unique, and things just get done in a very specific Chicago way.
“It’s just an interesting combination of Midwestern ethics with a kind of down-and-dirty Midwestern politics.”
