Very slight spoilers for the first episode or so of Lucifer ahead.
As I’ve recently finished season 4 of Lucifer and season 1 of The Blacklist, I was hit with a startling revelation : this is the same show.
I’m kidding. . . or am I?
OK, so the girl cop meets bad boy trope isn’t unique to these two shows and i’m sure I could find it all over mainstream television (if I tried! 😉 ) and yes, the dynamic of “cop who has to play by the rules but has a criminal friend who doesn’t” is all over media, including popular books.
But the fact that both shows have many similarities is good – because it gives me a chance to VICIOUSLY SLAMDUNK Lucifer on just how many things it did wrong to the point that it’s criminal – and that not only could it have been avoided (Blacklist came out 2 years before Lucifer) but should have been at least used Blacklist as a point of reference and copied [more] aspects from it.
Let me get this out of the way : there is nothing that Lucifer does that Blacklist doesn’t do better, at least up to the current point (Season 4 of Lucifer). Lucifer has improved a fair amount, and what i’ve gathered from gossiping websites is that Netflix will give even more NSFW freedoms to a series that, and apparently I need to say it, is called LUCIFER. A memo that the creators were clearly willing to compromise on with the network (Fox) in order to get this disappointment on air for 3 seasons.
So maybe it only gets better from here on out for Lucifer, and I hope it does! The concept was always good, however cheesy the execution and increasingly nonsensical the patchwork of excuses necessary to fix the bad premise and plot errors is.
But let’s get back to the good stuff, and by that I mean anything else than Lucifer.
Let’s start with what shocked me the most with Lucifer and that’s set design and set location. Season 1 must not have gotten much funding because it primarily alternates between 4 things : Lucifer’s room (yes, room – he owns a nightclub, but season 1 seems a lot more fond to show us his penthouse, which features a big room…. that’s it), helicopter shots of the very ugly high-rise meant to contain Lucifer’s club & penthouse, and the police station which apparently only has 2 rooms (the commons and an office).
You would think with 2 locations and helicopter shots of 1 of these locations they would add flavor – decorations between the seasons, different paintings at Lucifer’s apartment, detainees at the station, I don’t know, ANYTHING to differentiate between the hell that is Lucifer’s horribly bland set decors. If I remember correctly, instead of getting real decor the producers came up with an ingenious in-universe explanation for their laziness – the entirety of season 1 happens within ~3 months.
Incredible.
There’s no real reason why it had to happen within 3 months. One of the two lead characters, Chloe, is a detective, and if a detective was solving as many crimes IRL as she is she would be LEADING the LAPD by now. I’m saying this to demonstrate just how much this show could have slowed down with no detriment to the story and only benefits.
You know, unless you consider spending 10$ at the dollar store on SET PROPS A FUCKING NEGATIVE.
(Yeah, this is the aerial shot the club)
Wow. Yeah. We’re still on set design. And you should be too if you watched the show. I’ve never been more irked by location and set design than with this show, because there’s no good reason to mess it up this badly.
Reservoir Dogs happened in one room. One warehouse. And a few shots in cars. There’s no excuse, if you’re a TV series and you’ll be re-using the same goddamn sets and locations, at least make sure they’re not eyesores.
So, *sigh*, let’s move on to characters.
Lucifer has a great premise character-wise, the show certainly doesn’t suck because of the concept. Detective needs help solving cases, hot boytoy with a lot of money and weird but fitting power helps out where “The Law” stops.
This shouldn’t be a shocker from my intro, but The Blacklist has, well…
A detective that needs help solving cases, and the definition of a gentleman who happens to have deep pockets and also guns and the weird ability to find people and information using the POWER of CASH as well as the ability to make people talk by SMACKING the SHIT out of them.
Same thing, in practice.
But where Blacklist gets creative with the dynamics of having one character be “above the law” and having mysterious connections, Lucifer narrows itself down.
Lucifer uses his charm the same way, every episode. There isn’t any new dimension to it that’s ever added, Lucifer never eats a weird mushroom or dress up funny, there is no “powerup”.
Instead, where that fails Lucifer uses money or sex.
Sex would be a funny and relatively fresh take, but this is a show that’s JUST NOW after it’s 4th season being granted “more NSFW” privileges. I can only remember sex being important to the cases about three or four times at most.
So that leaves us with money, the superpower of Batman (or Raymond Reddington). But just as with most things on Lucifer, the superpower of ca$h is deeply mishandled.
Raymond Reddington from Blacklist has international investments and assets, he’s got henchmen, he’s got people. He’s got plays and edges to keep him on top.
Lucifer has a nightclub, and – STOP stop stop! Don’t you dare make us create more sets, we had to make the police station and the penthouse, we’re already overworked as it is!
Okay, so Lucifer as a show is ugly, the show fails to differentiate itself meaningfully from other shows by not capitalizing on what makes it different whilst being pretty bad at doing what other shows have in common, that leaves the cast and the writing/story.
Lucifer has an interesting dynamic for a cast : a psychologist/therapist, 2 cops, a forensic specialist, Lucifer, Lucifer’s brother who is an angel, and a demon enforcer/crybaby. That’s pretty limiting, and it shows. The forensic specialist as well as a few other transient characters were added in season 2+ to fix the dire mistake of having such a small cast but it wasn’t enough without a good story.
Each episode follows roughly this pattern : Detective Decker finds or is assigned a dead dude. No one is talking, and/or there’s no leads. Lucifer uses his cash or just happens to know someone related to the case. The suspect doesn’t talk, so Lucifer does his magic charm. That guy doesn’t know shit, but he knows someone that did it. So Lucifer does his charm AGAIN, or he threatens to kill Suspect #2 or Decker threatens to put them in jail for a gajillion-trillion years. It turns out that guy didn’t do it either, so they all rush back to the scene of the murder and holy shit it was the janitor this whole time. Straight out of a Scooby-Doo episode and I am not shitting you this part happens at the end of every single episode, the murderer admits and explains why he did everything, no lawyer or law or anything in-universe that makes any sense necessary. Episode over.
This ‘loop’ happens every episode without fail except for the first and last episodes. I don’t remember them making any significant changes to the modus operandi in any other case than the 2 last episodes of Season 3, which is when the series was cancelled by Fox.
There is very little major character development between each episode and there is almost no world-building that is actually achieved – for comparison I think Lucifer did about as much world and character building in 4 seasons as Blacklist did in 1 – that’s a ratio of 3:1. Yikes.
To wrap this up, even though I could bash this show (as well as go into Blacklist, which I kept out to keep the post compact) quite a lot more – Lucifer HAS gotten better through the seasons. Even so, I wouldn’t recommend this show to anyone. Spend your time somewhere else, like reading my really smart blog posts, or watching The Blacklist if you somehow thought Lucifer had any redeeming qualities prior or whist reading this post. Do anything else.
Fuck Lucifer.