If, as a  police procedural show, you are going to address police brutality, at least do it right and not as an afterthought.

Prodigal Son, is an American crime drama series about a disgraced FBI profiler, Malcolm (played by Tom Payne) who happens to be the son of a serial killer. The show follows the exploits of Malcolm as he seeks to solve crime in a hilariously unhinged manner, his battle with his mental health, his identity, his relationship with his charming but psychopathic father, his meddling mother and somewhat detached sister.

(Prodigal Son is gripping and hilarious TV  and if you haven’t seen it, you definitely should.)

Despite everything going on with this show, it remains a crime drama which means there is a new killer every episode so the show definitely has a lot going on without loading in current events like Black Lives Matter and the Corona Virus but this is exactly what the show chose to do in a manner so clumsy, it bordered on being very “offhand”.



Season 1 of Prodigal Son ended with Martin Whitly (played by Michael Sheen) in gen pop having been stripped of his celebrity prisoner privileges. By the premiere of Season 2, Dr. Whitly is back in his VIP cell having "single-handedly" saved the prison from a coronavirus disaster. This is the only time the virus is mentioned and it’s literally used as a get-out-of-genpop-free-card as there seems to be absolutely no blowback from the virus – nobody died, nobody is obsessively washing their hands because it’s now a routine. Nothing.

The most shocking addition to the second season of Prodigal Son is the introduction of Black Lives Matter which is quite literally violently shoved on us – as JT, a black NYPD detective (played by Frank Harts) is shoved against a wall and choked while in the line of duty by a white police officer who refused to let him show his badge. It’s not surprising that the show chooses to shed light on police brutality giving recent events and being a show about cops. What’s clumsy about it is the timing considering the shows's cast members.

Let me explain.


The NYPD force we are used to seeing on our screens is made up of a five-man team, a very Caucasian Malcolm Bright, a black male detective, JT, a female Latina detective, Dani (played by Aurora Perrineau), a female Asian Medical Examiner, Edrisa (played by Keiko Agena) and Lieutenant Arroyo (played by Lou Diamond Philips) whose heritage isn’t very obvious but his last name speaks to a Spanish descent at least.  Prodigal Son’s NYPD team is a very diverse one and up until the premiere of Season 2, the storyline seemed to be set in a perfect world where, other than the gruesome killings, there was no sexism or racial discrimination as it was never mentioned, implied, or shown in Season 1.

The show tries to cover its tracks or explain its abrupt addition of Black Lives Matter in S2E02 where Malcolm and Dani are talking about JT’s racial discrimination issue and Malcolm says “it’s bad out there” to which Dani responds

“It’s always bad. The difference is that people are paying attention. It’s like they just realized that the world is racist and cops target black people’’

No, you [Prodigal Son] are the ones just paying attention as given the diversity of the cast, had plenty of opportunities to address police brutality and racial profiling but didn’t think to until after the highly publicized death of George Floyd. (Prodigal Son Season 1 finale aired in April 2020 and George Floyd was murdered in May 2020 so Season 2 was the soonest they could ‘hop on the train’.



To make matters worse, Prodigal Son is doing a very poor job of addressing racial injustice as JT’s struggle with race is treated more as a storyline that will lead to a climax episode (only to be dropped later) rather than an ongoing everyday struggle. After the violent shove against a wall, the next incident is where JT seems to be getting hazed or bullied – he identifies himself when he calls for backup and the officer on the other end accuses him of impersonating a police officer. JT has called for backups many times in the past; why hasn’t this been mentioned before? He’s not recently black, nor recently transferred from an all-black police annex to the NYPD  - he has always been black, and introducing his struggles like it has always been there is just incredibly lazy. And as much as I despise flashbacks as explanations for a current event, I would have settled for one at this point.

After the first episode of Season 2, we only get offhand references to the discrimination case until S02E05 where JT attends mediation with a Union rep, Gil Arroyo, and the white officer who shoved him and chooses not to file a complaint because he doesn’t want it to mess up his life. It’s going to get worse for JT- he knows it, they know it, we know it. My bane with the storyline is that JT (or any non-Caucasian person) isn’t getting discriminated until the discrimination is the story.

I love Prodigal Son and all its awkwardness and craziness (my heart was stolen when Malcolm, with a perpetual crazy glint in his eye, chopped off a guy’s hand to ‘save him’) and I acknowledge the need to show social issues like this on TV but if you’re going to shed light on matters that literally gets people killed in real life then at least do it right and treat it seriously not as some kind of buzzword or social trend to hop on.