*TV Review: Da Vinci’s City Hall
Sidling up to the ambiguities of power
By Susan Ferguson
The CBC web site for Da Vinci’s City Hall announces “From the low track to the fast lane, from the back alleys to the corridors of power, join Dominic Da Vinci as he takes you behind the closed doors where the deals that shape the city are made and broken.”
Well, yes, Da Vinci is mayor of Canada’s third largest city, Vancouver. And yes, he has left behind his cluttered, glass-walled digs (where he resided for six seasons as Vancouver coroner on Da Vinci’s Inquest) for a lush red leather chair in a spacious wood-paneled office.
In so doing, not only has Da Vinci, a former cop with left-leaning sympathies and bad hair (played by actor Nicholas Campbell), lost the transparency and accessibility those glass walls symbolized, but he’s no longer in a position to push up against the power structure from the outside. Rather, he is planted firmly within it – and it’s a whole new ball game.
Back alleys of power
But in another sense, not all that much has changed. Indeed, the chief genius of both Inquest and City Hall lies in showing us that the back alleys and corridors of power are just two sides of the same coin.
And in relieving Da Vinci of his coroner duties and saddling him with the perks and problems of public office, the show’s creators have brought the dilemma of social democracy – that is, the attempt to reform the system from within – to the small screen.
City Hall, thus, offers an even deeper appreciation than Inquest did of who’s ultimately pulling the strings – and the complex web through which that power is brokered. Many of you won’t be surprised to hear that the council and councilors whom we typically associate with municipal politics (that is, the supposed life and blood of representative democracy) hardly ever appear on the show.
As mayor, Da Vinci maintains his do-goodist sensibilities and blunt, crumpled Colombo-like persona. This goes a long way toward establishing him as an outsider among the slicker, more politically “pragmatic” types he now runs with.
But it doesn’t take long – in fact, it took only about 15 minutes into the first episode – before we see signs that he’s going to have to make a few deals with the devil to get what he wants.
And, appropriately enough for a show about municipal politics, his first Beelzebub comes in the form of a wealthy developer. Determined to save a threatened racetrack (and the jobs it delivers), the new mayor starts to cozy up to the developer, a man even his handlers don’t entirely trust. Over the next few episodes, Da Vinci becomes increasingly indebted to him, setting the stage perhaps for a more major capitulation.
Countless storylines
But the power of the wealthy is not the only pressure the new mayor must learn to live with. Police Chief Bill Jacobs (Brian Markinson), an arrogant tightwad with no love for the former coroner, flexes his muscles by, among other things, refusing to effectively police Da Vinci’s pet project, a legal red light district.
Meanwhile, Da Vinci’s plans to replace Jacobs backfire when the chief’s key aide helps to orchestrate a police union backlash over the mayor’s plan to cross-train cops and firefighters. This particular tug of war is fascinating for the way in which it is played out entirely through rumours and backroom negotiations.
Those are just two of the countless storylines – seven were introduced in the first episode alone. While there’s less of the street in City Hall than there was in Inquest (and fewer dead bodies), a number of the stories stem from Da Vinci’s old stomping ground, Vancouver’s impoverished Downtown Eastside.
Only now, Nick (played by Ian Tracey), the Inquest cop who lived for a while out of his truck, is the new coroner while the prime homicide team is made up Nick’s former partner Angela (Venus Terzo), and Joe (Patrick Gallagher).
And, as with the previous series, which for example built one of its main stories around Vancouver’s missing prostitutes, City Hall draws heavily on actual crime and political intrigue. (The concept for the series, in fact, draws from the “real life” coroner, Larry Campbell, who was Vancouver’s mayor from 2002 to 2005.)
The squat in the abandoned Woodward’s department store is inspiration for a storyline about the homeless and anti-poverty activists. In another, a teenaged girl is accused of being the ring leader of a gay bashing, an incident that evokes the beating and murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk by a group of her schoolmates.
Race, class and gender in the forefront
Both Inquest and City Hall are known for their social realism. Along with characters that allow for ambiguity, nuance and serpentine, multilayered and sometimes unresolved plots, that approach has placed issues of class, race and gender in the forefront.
Both series showcase probably the most diverse casts on TV, with oppressed groups represented both inside and outside the system in equal measure. But more than that, the shows’ plots are often built around those unequal social relations. For instance, Nick is now on the trail of another city developer, whom he suspects is implicated in a sex scandal involving aboriginal boys.
Still, there are a number of things I miss about the old show. I miss Helen, Da Vinci’s former secretary in the coroner’s office (played by Sarah Strange). Smart, wry and lacking the usual TV glamour-gal look, she was simply a great female character. Her City Hall parallel, Da Vinci’s chauffeur, may have some of those qualities, but she hasn’t clinched it for me yet.
Having dropped Helen, in fact, the new series highlights a weakness in its portrayal of women more generally: while the men run the gamut of body sizes, looks and ages, the women all fit the same mold – pretty, thin 20- or 30-somethings, usually with well coiffed hair cascading over their shoulders. (Although she sports shorter hair, the lesbian cop is particularly attractive.)
And the dialogue has changed ever so slightly. While it still is eons ahead of the stuff you get almost anywhere else on TV for its laidback, imperfect cadence and phrasing, it has nonetheless inched up a notch in slickness. There aren’t as many pauses, ums and such. There’s not nearly as much to-and-fro banter as the characters work through a dilemma, rehearsing, for example, just exactly how a body ended up in a sewer. The dialogue is more assertive, less communicative – just a tad.
The treatment of class, however, is particularly interesting in City Hall because of Da Vinci’s decidedly more ambiguous class loyalties. Sidling up with the rich and famous is something the coroner did very rarely. The mayor, however, does so regularly. And it is to the credit of the show’s creators that he seems to enjoy it, without apology, including literally getting into bed with capital as he sleeps with the city’s major AIDS benefactress (apparently a one-night stand).
Nothing innocent
Moreover, there’s nothing innocent about such encounters as they’re often a way to deploy a deeper appreciation of class issues. The scene of a high society AIDS benefit is inter-cut with a scene of the cops raiding the squat and beating up the homeless (unbeknownst to, and against the express wishes of, the mayor).
As we see Zack, the retired cop Da Vinci has sent down to keep an eye on things, being bashed with a nightstick, Da Vinci and his hostess slip out onto the balcony of her swanky condo for a few moments in private – clearly setting up an overarching theme of City Hall: just how seductive wealth and power prove to be to the new mayor.
