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Everything good (and bad) about television is stolen. This includes what TV insiders fondly refer to as “innovations.” NBC’s Miami Vice, for example, is a jazzed-up retread of Raymond Chandler, film noir with the strobe lights on and the saxophones up. But Miami Vice still comes across as passably fresh, and its phenomenal success among the baby-boomers has caused the other networks to scramble wildly for clones.

So far all but one of Miami Vice’s imitators have vanished without a trace in the lower third of the Nielsens, the Bermuda Triangle of commercial television. The sole exception to this gaudy series of flops is The Equalizer, an ingenious attempt by CBS to apply the techniques used by the producers of Miami Vice to a show filmed on location in New York and aimed at a slightly older audience. (One suspects that the real audience for Miami Vice is not so much baby-boomers as their pubescent children.) But while Miami Vice deals in glittering tales of the rich and venal, The Equalizer is about a far more commonplace subject: the fear of random violence that lurks in the heart of every city dweller. The Equalizer, for all its trendy glossiness, appeals directly and powerfully to the dark muse of urban paranoia.

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.

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Everything good (and bad) about television is stolen. This includes what TV insiders fondly refer to as “innovations.” NBC’s Miami Vice, for example, is a jazzed-up retread of Raymond Chandler, film noir with the strobe lights on and the saxophones up. But Miami Vice still comes across as passably fresh, and its phenomenal success among the baby-boomers has caused the other networks to scramble wildly for clones.

So far all but one of Miami Vice’s imitators have vanished without a trace in the lower third of the Nielsens, the Bermuda Triangle of commercial television. The sole exception to this gaudy series of flops is The Equalizer, an ingenious attempt by CBS to apply the techniques used by the producers of Miami Vice to a show filmed on location in New York and aimed at a slightly older audience. (One suspects that the real audience for Miami Vice is not so much baby-boomers as their pubescent children.) But while Miami Vice deals in glittering tales of the rich and venal, The Equalizer is about a far more commonplace subject: the fear of random violence that lurks in the heart of every city dweller. The Equalizer, for all its trendy glossiness, appeals directly and powerfully to the dark muse of urban paranoia.

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.