Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - The streets of where I'm from are paved with hearts instead of gold

Spender - "Homecoming" - January 8, 1991

There always seems to be a need for shows about the police to constantly be re-inventing the genre. It seems that every few years a new show comes out that promises to finally show the truth and grit of the lives of the world of crime (We have reached the point where, with Life on Mars, one of the unspoken tropes is that the show is so gritty that it is no longer legal for the Police to engage in the gritty truthfulness that you are about to see.)

As we will see as I go back and forth in televisual history, the ground that is being broken might not be as significant as it seems at the time.

The ground that seems to be broken in this first episode of Spender falls into two categories:

1. A confirmation of the existence of Newcastle
2. Of all the variations of quirky detective/policeman personalities, it is harder and harder to create a personality that is at once recognisable, but yet new and interesting. After all the quirky, hard boiled, and however many variations of straight arrows the genre can manage, in Detective Spender we have a new type - an enormous mope.

First, a bit about Newcastle.

I grew up in a depressed industrial city that is located in what well-paid political consultants tend to refer to as "America's Heartland." Because of this, a lot of this episode's "So, you've come back for a visit, eh?" tone really hit home with me. The Newcastle here has that same feel - that mixture of "We're just as good as that la-di-da metropolis that you've left us for, we have everything that you want, you just never bothered to find out" and the "We're better than that la-di-da metropolis that you've left us for, because we don't have all that stuff that they have -- It means we're more honest and real." I also know what it is like to go back and look up old friends - you see that passing of time more clearly when you've been away.

I suppose I'm doing more to talk about the second point - Why is Spender such an enormous mope? I do get it. Here in my la-di-da metropolis I have become skilled at playing the "naive milk-drinking Midwesterner" card. It's a good trick. (I enjoy making up completely nonsensical regional slang just to watch the reaction.) I imagine that, in London, he came to use his "well, I'm from the North and we do things like this" as a tool, rather than as a detriment. So tossing him back into Newcastle takes away that edge.

So anyway, as much as I understand it, I do not understand the plot. Such as:

1. The initial incident that sends him to Newcastle is so obviously an equipment failure that nobody could possibly find fault with him.
2. He is reluctant to have his children stay with him, as he is going to be working on police work, thus making them vulnerable. They know who he is, and he hasn't been to Newcastle for a while, so they must have come to London and stayed with him while he was a policeman.
   
3. His method of purposely screwing up is to tip off the mob boss that he is meant to help bring down that he (the mob boss) is about to be arrested. The mob boss declares that he will have revenge on Spender for saving his neck.
4. Meanwhile, the police chief that Spender screwed up for to get himself fired keeps him on.

One of the things about first episodes is that they are more set up than sense. There are a lot of balls in the air here. I'm curious to see how they all come down.