Copper Review
I debated turning off Copper during the ridiculously long opening credits – and I should have.
I’m all for detective shows. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t watch the day-long NCIS marathons USA schedules. But there’s just something about Copper that doesn’t quite do it for me.
The BBC show takes places during the 1860s in the “notorious Five Points neighborhood” of New York City.
The opening scene, which arrives after a House of Cards-length introduction, was way more graphic than I was prepared for at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning. After Kevin Corcoran offers a starving girl an apple, she offers to “pleasure” him. She also looks 12-years-old. He, thankfully, turns her down and goes outside where he shoots three people.
So now it’s 10:05 a.m. and I’ve witnessed underage prostitution and blood spattering everywhere. I guess my week can only go up from here.
Like any detective show, Copper is full of cheesy one-liners that will make your eyes roll all the way up to the ceiling and stay there while you debate whether or not you should just turn off the show.
Corcoran bursts through the door where his wife or mistress or… another prostitute, I’m not sure, is gussying up in front of the mirror. She tells him he could show some courtesy by knocking, to which he replies by saying, “I don’t have any courteous thoughts right now,” and then kisses her furiously.
Smooth.
On a more positive note, the thing I enjoyed most in Copper was the old fashioned forensics.
One of my favorite parts of any NCIS episode was watching Abby and Ducky do all of the different forensics. I thought Abby’s machines were crazy cool, and I was always impressed by the way Ducky could tell time of death just by looking at the body.
In the 1860’s, obviously, there wasn’t a Major Mass Spec or a ballistics lab. The forensics person in Copper draws a to-scale sketch of what the little girl’s head wound looks like because it’s quickly fading. Then he makes a mold of her head and bashes it with different things so he can figure out what the murder weapon was.
Even in the 1860’s, he could tell that the man who inflicted the wound was 6 feet tall because of the angle the murder weapon hit her skull at. That fascinates me.
While I’m not Copper’s biggest supporter, I understand why people would enjoy the show. The overall plot is very well-rounded: on top of solving cases, there’s adultery, politics, and the beginning of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Corcoran is a deep character. He’s an Irish-immigrant-turned-detective whose wife and daughter were killed while he was off at war.
While BBC canceled the third season, the first two seasons of Copper are available on Netflix.
Here’s a trailer of the show.
