'The Chicago Code' takes on ugly corruption through beautiful screenwriting

Chicago police officers should have their hands full protecting their fine city from the crime and corruption, but Shawn Ryan’s newest FOX drama, The Chicago Code, makes a heavy-handed effort to showcase the crime and corruption within their own departments is a much bigger threat than every thief and mobster combined.

Police Superintendent Theresa Colvin (Jennifer Beals) is a woman who grew up seeing that corruption secondhand when her father, a local business owner, was shaken down year after year until it ultimately ruined his business. Being witness to such an insider’s club-- where everyone slips dirty money into the palms of the men with whom they are shaking hands-- strengthened her resolve to force changes on her city. She managed to do some good as a detective, teamed up with the somewhat volatile Detective Jarek Wysocki (Jason Clarke), but now she uses her own position of bureaucratic power to call in favors and dole out special permissions to get the job done.

In her friendship with Wysocki, which allows him to take his pick of cases as long as he is ultimately working alongside her as her only true confidante on bringing down Alderman Gibbons (Delroy Lindo), she is basically instituting the same kind of special favors that she is working so hard to take down. The show very cleverly allows the audience to see this through her actions and her constant one-on-ones with Wysocki, who it would appear she is prepping for a Chief of Staff position, but it thus far does not outwardly address the hypocrisy. She is working within the confines of the law, not taking bribes, not hiring hits, and so her actions are to be not only overlooked as being extremely biased but are asked to be somewhat celebrated: she is standing up to injustice so any traces of her own immorality are relative.

Wysocki, meanwhile, is a rebel in and of himself. He can’t seem to keep a partner, though it isn’t entirely clear on who’s fault that is. He may be too wild for the average uniform or the average uniform may just be unable to live up to his standards. While he is somewhat reckless, forcing his early pilot partner to pull up alongside a suspect with a gun driving a stolen car simply so he can try to talk some sense into him, he has strong instincts and won’t settle for anything less. He just may have met his match with young Caleb Evers (Matt Lauria), a seemingly by-the-book who does bow down to more seasoned authority a bit too easily to truly go with his gut but whose gut proves to know what it’s doing when he does listen to it.

The Chicago Code isn’t your typical police procedural; it doesn’t play by the “paint by numbers” format, and you won’t be able to fit each week’s episode into a nice mold, popping in and out as you wish. Yes, you will see dead bodies, but it won’t be about trying to figure out whodunit and how they can nail the perps to the proverbial wall. The show is much more focused on Chicago police work as a whole and how things get done there from the political end of the spectrum.

The corruption throughline is one that is set up almost immediately within the pilot but will ebb and flow as episodes progress and as these detectives get distracted by other cases, politics, and the occasional personal issue. One of the most interesting characters in this is Liam Hennessey (Billy Lush), a kid who seems to just be from the wrong side of the tracks but is really an undercover officer struggling with what he sees and can’t prevent on a daily basis. He has an itchy trigger finger for calling in tips he hears, even when he’s not completely secure in sharing the secrets, and if you know the genre, you know it’s probably only a matter of time before that gets him into trouble.

In a world where the boys (and girls) in blue need to rely on each other to keep themselves safe day in and day out, The Chicago Code may just prove you can really only trust yourself.

The Chicago Code premieres on February 7th at 9pm only on FOX.