For weeks, readers have been checking in to ask if I’ve gotten around to watching “American Crime,” John Ridley’s anthology series for ABC, which spent its second season exploring the events that unfold after a rape allegation at an elite private school in Indianapolis.
Now that I’ve watched “American Crime,” which aired its finale Wednesday night, I owe those readers an apology: “American Crime” is one of the very best things I’ve seen on television in a long time, a beautifully composed, morally serious drama full of remarkable acting. Other shows could stand to learn from it.
That’s not to say that this season, which initially focuses on Taylor Blaine (Connor Jessup), a scholarship student at the prestigious Leyland School, and then expands outward after Taylor says he was assaulted at a basketball team party, is perfect.
In particular, I think it was a mistake for “American Crime” to include school shooting and hacking plotlines (Taylor shoots a basketball player who tormented him, and a hacker tries to help his mother, Anne, played by Lili Taylor). The series ultimately doesn’t have much to add to the debates about the role of bullying and social marginalization in mass shootings; or to questions about cybersecurity. And most of all, the second season of “American Crime” was a horror story even before Taylor pulled the trigger.
The source of that horror is the extent to which children aren’t knowable to their parents.
Anne Blaine thinks she knows her son, until her idea of him is shattered first by the pictures of him in various states of undress and incapacitation that are circulating on social media and that lead to his disclosure that he was assaulted. Michael LaCroix (Andr? Benjamin) believes he understands his son, basketball team captain Kevin (Trevor Jackson), who hosted the party where Taylor said he was attacked, until the moment he finds himself holding Kevin by the throat, demanding to know if Kevin raped Taylor — Michael’s fear about who Kevin might be, turning Kevin into a version of himself he doesn’t recognize. Curt Tanner (Brent Anderson) believes that he’s ensured his son Eric (Joey Pollari) a decent future by getting him into Leyland, only to have his sense of who Eric is rearranged by the revelation that not only is Eric the suspect in the attack on Taylor but also that he is gay.
And basketball coach Dan Sullivan (Timothy Hutton) suffers a double loss. He believes that he’s invested in his team and sees the boys in his care clearly until the rape allegation challenges his self-image; Sullivan ultimately fails that test, retreating into denial and defensiveness.
Sullivan is confronted for a second time when his daughter Becca (Sky Azure Van Vliet) turns out to have problems much more severe than twerking during cheerleading practice. When he learns that Becca sold drugs to Taylor shortly before the shooting, and in fact has been selling drugs for quite some time, his response is to try to destroy her phone: What he really wants to smash and shove down the disposal is this new image of her that contradicts his sense of himself as a good, attentive father.
As Leyland head Leslie Graham (Felicity Huffman) put it in Wednesday night’s finale, when Dan came to beg her for help after denying her similar plea for aid: “But you’re so skilled at teaching right from wrong, and connecting with students as people, not just as names on a ledger, isn’t that what you told me?”
None of this is to say that Taylor, or Kevin, or Eric, or Becca are monsters. It’s simply that the events of “American Crime” suddenly reveal them to be unfamiliar, both to their parents and to us, and do so in a way that’s far more brutal than the normal process by which children separate themselves from their parents. “What it was isn’t how it is,” Michael’s wife, Terri (the magnificent Regina King), says wearily toward the end of the episode.
The strength of “American Crime” as a political drama was that it anchored the issues it wants to explore in this fundamental conflict.
Focusing on a boy’s experience of sexual assault rather than a girl’s allows “American Crime” to break away from pre-existing conversations about rape, but it also means that Anne and Curt end up learning that their sons were not — as they had assumed — heterosexual.
In a similar way, making Taylor poor and white and Kevin wealthy and African-American allows “American Crime” to shake loose from established storytelling about race, privilege and power. If Anne expects the law to work a certain way for her son, perhaps that’s because she’s white, even though she’s not rich. And while Terri and Michael are acutely aware that they face particular hurdles as African-Americans, the events of “American Crime” show them the limits of the protection their money can buy them.
The tangle of plotlines also comes together to suggest that class, as represented by the glistening halls of Leyland and the LaCroixs’ gorgeous modernist house, doesn’t offer all the benefits its characters expect. Terri and Michael recognize that they have to stop using their money to protect Kevin and begin parenting more directly, communicating with him more honestly and setting a stronger moral example. Anne must confront the horrifying idea that sending Taylor to a private school damaged him rather than elevated him. And Curt and his ex-wife make the choice to get one of their sons out of the public school system while leaving another one behind, a decision that further divides their splintering family.
It’s true that the personal is political. But the great and valuable insight of “American Crime” is that you can say more and more complicated things about politics when audiences are invested in characters who feel like real people. Ridley’s masterful series ended its second season with a series of queasy, unsettled notes. As both art and politics, it’s the most powerful conclusion he could have given us.
