One Season Wonder: Terriers

I was very happy to join Jen Johans on the Watch With Jen podcast to discuss the one season wonder television phenom Terriers. Created by Ted Griffin and executive produced by Shawn Ryan with Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James out front as an ex-cop and ex-con barely running a scrappy detective agency in Ocean Beach, California. 

The show is a favorite re-watchable for me that gets better and more impressive with subsequent revisits. The episode was a lot of fun to research and, as always, the discussion with Jen was great (please consider becoming a patron for Jen's film writing and podcast).

Terriers belongs to a lineage of shaggy private eyes stumbling through SoCal dealing with substance abuse, dependency, divorce and broken family relationships as well as iffy honor codes and the high cost of living, but resolute in their rumpled righteous refusal to play the man's game. Shit, that may even be optimism. 

Of course they're destined for heartbreak or to be the fool in somebody else's story if fortune smiles on them, and far worse and darker than amber destinations if reality bites, but the game is afoot and the feet are sandaled and the sun is shining on even a dead terrier's ass. 

Here are a few more Terriers tangential titles I believe the show cribs something from.

Ross MacDonald's character Lew Archer is in California, and his investigations run up against a lot of kookie characters, but he's a lot more put together than most of the examples on the list. I've read a few of the books in the series, but I'm much more familiar with the film versions. For the movies Lew Archer becomes Lew Harper (supposedly in order to keep Paul Newman's hot-streak of H-titles alive - Hustler, Hud, Hombre) for Harper. Based on the novel The Moving Target, it is an extremely self-conscious 1960s private eye movie clearly looking to compare itself to the gold-standard of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe books and films including Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep - a film that opens with the detective being interviewed by an eccentric wealthy man about the kind of man/detective he is and having the rich man's daughter throw herself at him. Harper opens with the detective being interviewed by a wealthy woman, (Lauren Bacall - Bogart's wife and co-star in The Big Sleep) about what kind of man/detective he is, her missing husband and then their daughter throw herself him. 

Lew Harper grows old and Paul Newman becomes Harry Ross for Robert Benton's Twilight which includes other casting nods to 60s/70s detectives (Gene Hackman as the MacDonald-esque Harry Moseby in Night Moves which, for as much as Harper wanted to be seen as a "new kind" of private eye movie seems awfully stuck in the studio system compared to Night Moves directed by Arthur Penn whose Bonnie & Clyde -from a script by Benton- announced the expiration date on the old Hollywood studio picture and the beginning of the New Hollywood era, and James Garner from Marlowe based on Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister as Raymond Hope). 

The Drowning Pool was the only official sequel to Harper, but Twilight effectively turns the flicks into a trilogy with the ending re-creating the climactic scene from Harper with Newman's detective unsure what to do with the curse of solving the case and finding a friend at the heart of it. If you consider Newman to be the same character in both films the similarities don't strain credulity (how can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?) but rather re-enforce the themes and demonstrate that as much as they want to be separate themselves from what came before and be era-defining stories, nothing's changed (of course the same shit is still happening). 

Nothing's changed in people, but the person Newman's old man has turned into handles the same old shit a different way. Which way is more heroic? Either? Neither? Could he get it right both times? Wrong both times? Both endings stick. 

The title Twilight evokes the aging of the cast and characters all looking back on their days, the memories of which seem bleached from too much exposure, while the dusk makes the same old shit beautiful because it will soon be invisible. 

But the sun also rises and just like Jake Barnes, the emasculated by gunshot main character of Hemingway's masculine romance, Harry Ross finds himself rumored to have suffered a similar injury after being shot high in the thigh by the daughter of best friends Hackman and Susan Sarandon on the job.

Benton is an under-noted contributor to crime film culture. He co-wrote Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's There Was a Crooked Man... and he co-adapted Scott Phillips' The Ice Harvest with Richard Russo for Harold Ramis and he directed The Late Show, Still of the Night, Nadine and Billy Bathgate too. His directorial debut Bad Company is a western that pits Jeff Bridges against Tom Huddelston in the finale, a matchup next seen 25 years later in The Big Lebowski which shares similar stoner-noir DNA with Terriers - see also Thomas Pynchon's novel and Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Inherent Vice. 

Lebowski is really kind of a comedic remake of Adrian Passar's much darker Cutter's Way right down the casting of Jeff Bridges as the aimless central character whose biggest ambition is having a place to get comfortably stoned at the end of the day, and whose single moment of clarity is picked up on by their unhinged conspiracy-nut Viet Nam veteran best friend (John Heard and John Goodman respectively) who won't let it go and proceeds to drag our hapless easy-going central character unwillingly along a bizarre path toward the truth.

Adapted from the (even darker) novel Cutter & Bone by Newton Thornburg, Cutter's Way represents the grim end of Terriers' DNA. The dialogue is every bit as witty, but it's inescapably sad and dour; an uncompromising endless bummer set in the sleepy SoCal beach town of Santa Barbara. The specter of Viet Nam filters the sunny setting so effectively you'll think it's midnight at noon.

Somewhere in between the bitter hopeless nihilism of Cutter's Way and the goofy nihilists and post-idealism of The Big Lebowski is Jeremy Kagan's adaptation of Roger L. Simon's novel The Big Fix starring Richard Dreyfuss as Moses Wine a former 60s student radical eking out a living in the late 70s as a private investigator. His former compatriots either died in Viet Nam, fled the country to avoid the draft or are serving time in prison for their radical actions, but Moses finds himself a divorced father of two struggling to pay alimony and feeling some survivor's guilt over the sixties. When an old flame shows up and tells him she's working for a politician who wants to hire him to uncover the source of a smear campaign linking the establishment Democrat to a long-disappeared Weather Underground-esque terrorist he takes the gig feeling like it's just one more indication that he's sold out. The tone vacillates between light-hearted comedy and paranoid thriller with less consistently gold results than Terriers, but they share similar heartbeats and affections for the people who survived intense times because they were too weird to die.

The detective out of time bemusedly shuffling through Los Angeles equally out of place among the beach front neuvo-bohemians, the suspicious and fascist police force and the hip and sleazy gangster underbelly just trying to find some Curry brand cat food in the middle of the night and taking up the cause for strays, runaways and close friends in their hour of need is part of the Terriers brand, but maybe the best known example is Robert Altman's Chandler adaptation of The Long Goodbye starring the improbably perfect Elliott Gould as Marlowe as Rip Van Winkle. I know a lot of folk bristle at this treatment of classic text, but they need to wake up and smell the times, man. 

The 70s weren't all revisionist takes on classic noir tho. Roman Polanski's Chinatown served up Jack Nicholson as a slick hat-wearing private eye content with his station in life doing well-paying divorce work and regular gumshoe fare but who digs in deeper on a case when he finds his client set him up to look foolish. Professional reputation on the line he uncovers institutional corruption and moral rot among the powerful manipulating the whole city. So effective and devastating a story, Chinatown's plot has become kinda boilerplate for neo-noir recognizable in descendants like Terriers, Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress, James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential and another shaggy detective duo half-comedic favorite, Shane Black's The Nice Guys.

The buddy element of Terriers is a huge part of its appeal. Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James have fantastic chemistry and serve up the fast patter and easy-going ballbusting so essential to the buddy genre. If you think of the buddy crime movie as the homo-affectionate version of a classic screwball comedy you'll understand the value of that verbal repartee. Ted Griffin is clearly a fan of both. 

I think the cornerstone of the buddy crime picture is probably George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid with folks like Walter Hill (48 Hrs., Red Heat) and Peter Hyams (Busting, Running Scared) helping establish tropes before Shane Black took it supernova (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight). 

Add to the buddy element the beach noir of John D. McDonald's Travis McGee series (boat noir?), Don Winslow's Boone Daniels books and California Fire & Life, plus Kem Nunn's seminal surf noir Tapping the Source, (also The Dogs of Winter and Tijuana Straits), throw in a healthy dose of The Rockford Files and... maybe you'll get something kinda like Terriers.

Following the Terriers episode Ted Griffin expressed his appreciation and even contributed his own episodes to the Watch with Jen podcast including this one on Leo McCrary and this one on Curtis Hanson. Donal Logue also became a Watch with Jen regular so hey that's cool.

Here's hoping Terriers gets a DVD release. For now it's available on Hulu.

Looking for more Terriers episodes? Check out the Terriers podcast Beach Cop Detectives.

Testing... testing 1-2... Is this thing on?

Not saying the site is back. Not saying I am either. But there really isn't anything/anywhere else I have an outlet for some of the things this blog once provided for me and... I miss it. The pandemic and the global and domestic state of things really did a number on me and I'm not the same person I was before. 

But rather than start a brand new thing on some other platform or look to publish in other journals I may from time to time post something here... probably won't promote it. Not interested in guest pieces at this point, but... 

Find me on letterboxd if you like. I don't really talk much about films there, but I do post film lists sometimes and if you're so inclined you can follow my viewing habits.

Not on many social media sites, but the ones I am on don't provide the kind of outlet I once enjoyed there, but hey, feel free to look for me and ask a question if you have one.

We'll see as 2024 ramps up the insanity how long I can hang here, but... I do miss some things about this place.