ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 27, 1996 TAG: 9610250134
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Tom Shales
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
TYPE: TELEVISION REVIEW
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
``EZ Streets'' is a clear-cut case of assault with a deadly television show. It's dark, moody, glum, stylized and almost criminally pretentious.
A cop drama with a heavy heart and a leaden head, the new series premieres as a two-hour movie tonight at 9 on WDBJ-Channel 7, before moving to Wednesdays on Oct. 30. I can hardly wait to miss the second episode.
Ken Olin, once of ``thirtysomething,'' stars as Det. Cameron Quinn, a big-city cop with loads o' woe. Olin whined his way through ``thirtysomething'' and, for a change of pace, mopes his way through this, sometimes chewing gum in an effort to look cool.
Poor Det. Quinn loses his partner to killers in the first half hour of the show and then has to face hostile interrogators from internal affairs who think he might know the whereabouts of a missing $10,000. Quinn's father, it turns out, is an ex-cop who apparently did have a healthy income from the mob. Rod Steiger plays the part of Bad Dad but doesn't show up until the last half hour and then only for four minutes.
``EZ Streets'' also tells the parallel story of a young small-time crook named Danny Rooney, played by Jason Gedrick, who was the prime suspect last year on ``Murder One.'' Gedrick seems to be playing this role with a jaw full of Novocain. Maybe he was having dental work done on his off days. His performance is only slightly less dawdlingly drowsy than Olin's.
In the first scene, we see Olin at the docks where a mysterious barrel full of something is being unloaded from a small boat; only at the end of the show is it revealed what's in the barrel. Meanwhile, Gedrick is just being released from prison after three years for robbery, and it couldn't have been hard time because prison officials let him keep his hunky Hollywood haircut.
A mob boss named Murtha, played by Joe Pantoliano, tries to get the young man to re-enlist in the underworld, as it used to be called. The film cuts back and forth between Olin's story and Gedrick's. Once, near the end, they actually see one another on the street but they don't speak. That's apparently being saved for a later, thrill-packed episode.
Everybody in the cast of characters is surly and bitter and full of cheap angst. Even when Olin has sexual relations with a young woman, their morning-after chitchat is hostile and sour. It's a world of testy toughs and hard-boiled babes, and writer-director Paul Hassis apparently wants viewers to find it sort of coldly glamorous. Cold it is. Frozen stiff, in fact.
All the performances seem mannered. The show is full of actorly acting, the kind that rings false and calls attention to its own falseness. There are lots of dirty words (CBS is preceding the show with a parental advisory) though not an enormous amount of violence.
One gimmicky sequence finds white mobsters playing black gang members in a sandlot baseball game. When the pitcher hits the batter with the ball, everybody on the field pulls out a gun.
The title, incidentally, refers to the ``alphabet streets'' of the city that run along the waterfront, E Street through W Street. Where does the ``Z'' come from? An old cop explains it would sound silly to refer to the ``EW'ees'' but the ``E-Zees'' has a nice ``ironic'' ring to it.
The settings, indoors and outdoors, are brutally bleak, and the show has been souped up with a soundtrack full of musical wails and lamentations. There's no shortage of attitude to the production, that's for sure, but how far does attitude get you, really?
Already some critics have hailed the show as a breakthrough. True enough - it's a breakthrough from tedium into torpor. One reviewer called it ``evocative'' and that may be accurate, too; ``EZ Streets'' is evocative of a stale cheese sandwich, a cold day in northern Minnesota, and the heartbreak of psoriasis - all rolled into one.
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB