Missing 'Detroit 1-8-7' would be a real crime

By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

This week, maybe they should call it Detroit 9-1-1.

  • In the season finale, Detective Fitch (Michael Imperioli) gets a visit from his son, Bobby (Imperioli's real-life son, Vadim).

    By Alicia Gbur, ABC

    In the season finale, Detective Fitch (Michael Imperioli) gets a visit from his son, Bobby (Imperioli's real-life son, Vadim).

By Alicia Gbur, ABC

In the season finale, Detective Fitch (Michael Imperioli) gets a visit from his son, Bobby (Imperioli's real-life son, Vadim).

Sunday, ABC's Detroit 1-8-7 hits its first season finale, which just leaves time to send out a final distress call. If it were simply the best show you weren't watching, it would be bad enough. But after this special, post-Shark Tank 10 ET/PT outing ? an odd slot that is either a gift or a tomb ? it may also become the best show you'll never get a chance to watch again. And that would be criminal.

While the ratings, despite a slight recent rise, have not caught up, Detroit has grown into the best new broadcast show of the season, and the only freshman remaining that would be worth mourning should it depart. Without feeling forced or precious, the show has mastered the whole dramatic stretch: funny when it wants to be and yet moving when it needs to be.

What's more, the show is ending its first season with a great run of episodes. Still shaken by the murder of Detective Stone (D.J. Cotrona), whose "real" death after a staged fake one was one of the season's better surprises, the squad now faces a threat to Detective Fitch ? series star Michael Imperioli, as convincing and engaging here as he was in a very different role on The Sopranos. And if you need another Sunday draw, you get to see him act with his real-life son, Vadim, as Fitch's visiting son.

Yet beyond being a beautifully well-acted, increasingly engrossing crime drama, Detroit is a show ABC, and network TV as a whole, needs to make work. This is not just a series that proves the broadcast networks can compete with cable when it comes to serious dramas; it's the only network series that tries in any meaningful way to deal with the real-life struggles, burdens and joys of life in our large cities. That it's set and shot in Detroit, a great mid-America metropolis that seldom gets any airtime, is just the icing on the cake.

Like no other show on the air, and perhaps none since The Wire, Detroit uses its crime stories to explore and explain the city in which it's set. (At the moment, only The Chicago Code comes close, but its focus seldom strays from its fictional tale of corruption.) We see a proud, diverse city struggling to remake itself, its population split among those who are fighting against adversity, those who have given up, and those who are trying to pick the bones clean.

Still, as with any TV series, the real weekly draw is a strong cast of characters and actors ? anchored by Imperioli's Fitch, who follows in the footsteps of NYPD Blue's Andy Sipowicz as one of TV's classic, flawed cops. And speaking of Blue, that

show's James McDaniel has been equally good here as a soon-to-be-retired cop reconsidering his choices.

For one more week, non-viewers have a chance to reconsider their choices. Here's hoping a few more choose Detroit.

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