Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThe first scene of Showtime’s new series “Flatbush Misdemeanors” could go in any direction.
It features a Black cop confronting another Black man on the grounds of a school, declaring to dispatch that he suspects him to be a “kidnapper or a child predator” and insisting upon searching him.
The suspect was just delivering food, and the cop seizes it, stirs it with his pen, and licks it, before chasing after a kid who’s jumped over a fence.
Whatever seeming threat there had been in the scene’s earliest moments has been defused; the cop is a goofy annoyance who has just enough power to be pernicious — not the threat he might have been in a different series, but a frustrating part of life in a city trying to.
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