By Eleanor Boudreau
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkno/local-wkno-909169.mp3
Memphis, TN – Memphis Beat, TNT's new cop show set in Memphis, is actually shot mainly in New Orleans, but that's not the city it's trying to cash in on.
"Memphis is this incredibly dynamic city," said co-creator Joshua Harto in a clip from TNT's official overview.
The first shot of the first episode is of a fan, oscillating and blowing.
Then we meet detective Dwight Hendricks, played by the former My Name is Earl star Jason Lee. When we meet him, Hendricks isn't on his police beat, he's dressed in a leather jacket, coming down the stairs to the stage of a night club, guitar in hand, about to do his rendition of Heartbreak Hotel.
When Hendricks actually starts singing, he's still got the jacket on, but the guitar is nowhere in sight.
"Then there's a crime scene. Then there is over play of Green Onion by Booker T and the MGs, a liquor store, and so it just jumps into a kind of grungy crime-ridden city," said Earnestine Jenkins an associate professor of art history at the University of Memphis.
"Everything looks sort of amber, or over-heated. Everybody is sweating. The typical stereotypes when it comes to American film and the way that they sometimes depict the South," Jenkins said. "People do have air conditioning."
The show pilot centered around Hendricks, a white police detective, and the cultural references were mostly to Elvis, and a fictional old-time DJ, also white, who spun Elvis' records at the real radio station WHER.
Jenkins says that misses, "The large numbers of black people that started to come here after emancipation. And created Beale Street, and made it famous. They were coming here because this was the city, this was where you came to get jobs, you know, this is where you came for a freer lifestyle. This is where you came to escape that rural existence that was associated with slavery."
Law & Order just went off the air, but there is no dearth of slick, sexy police shows on T.V. On those other shows cops are often portrayed as flawed, but hard working, and very sharp people. By contrast, most of the cops of Memphis Beat, "Are either standing there doing nothing or eating. They are not shown doing high-level detective work," Jenkins said. "The show is set in the dumb South. It is all dumbed down."
TNT's slogan is, "We know drama." Not we know Memphis. So enjoy Memphis Beat, America. But don't take the image the show projects as gospel. In Memphis, we know gospel.