With the help of two sidekicks-Mel (Liza Lapira), an ex-Air Force sharpshooter, and Harry (Adam Goldberg), an I.T. Haunted by her misdeeds, she has left the agency and returned to New York City, where she enacts her penance: the extrajudicial exoneration of framed individuals in the tri-state area. “You work with orphans in Third World countries, so I can’t ever be unhappy,” her daughter complains what is strongly implied is that McCall did the opposite of help those children. In her past life, McCall did the dirtier bidding of the C.I.A. From the “Black Trans Lives Matter” poster on the wall of a community-activist character to the scene of a youth choir singing the anthem “Glory,” from Ava DuVernay’s film “Selma,” “The Equalizer” signals that it has the right politics, a nonnegotiable in post-Trump début television. I found this scheduling inspired: perhaps it moved the viewer to build a through line from the National Football League’s foul embrace of the language of the social-justice movement to the more soulful appropriation of the movement’s convictions in the series that followed. The series, a reboot of an eighties crime drama of the same name, premièred right after Super Bowl LV. The show is a gimme for an audience who’d die to have this therapeutic queen dismantle racial capitalism in one fell girl-boss swoop. Though she is styled a lot like Olivia Benson of “Law and Order: S.V.U.,” in domme leather outfits, often astride a motorcycle, McCall is a soothing, maternal figure. agent, is invariably there to rescue them. In each episode, an unequal system plunges a character, who is poor or Black or both, to the darkest of depths, and McCall, a former C.I.A. Their cluelessness allows “The Equalizer” to showcase the bad-bitch proficiency of its hero, Robyn McCall, played by the congenitally warm Queen Latifah. Wouldn’t this character, coded as she is, get it? And yet the series is full of Jewel Machados: people who are marginalized but still stunningly naïve about the forces of marginalization. “Who do you go to if you can’t go to the cops?” Jewel Machado, a high-achieving Latinx teen-ager, wonders, unbelievably, in the pilot of the CBS action procedural “The Equalizer.” Even considering the relative conservatism of prime-time drama, the line struck me as glaringly unhip.
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