“I don’t know what happened.” Taylor (Connor Jessup) is having trouble looking at his mom, Anne (Lili Taylor), and for good reason. She’s furious. “I saw the pictures,” she insists. “They’re online, they’re there forever.”
“The pictures” serve as the point of departure for the second season of American Crime, John Ridley’s ongoing look at the many ways that “crime” — as a concept, as a way of life and thinking, as a philosophy — structures American life. The pictures — circulating via social media among students at Leyland, the Indianapolis prep school Taylor attends — suggest a number of possible crimes at the start of the first episode. He appears to be drunk or otherwise impaired, his demeanor and clothing in disarray, his eyes hazy. It seems likely, as he tells Anne, that he doesn’t know what happened, which might explain his reluctance to talk to her or his girlfriend Evy (Angelique Rivera), or to return to school. All he’s seeing is what everyone else is seeing: the pictures.
His distress emphasized by the series’ affection for close-up shots, Taylor finds no help at school, either. When fundraising whiz and headmaster Leslie Graham (Felicity Huffman) learns of the photos, she suspends Taylor for not living up to the institution’s expectations of proper behavior. Anne’s effort to find out what happened is in part her response to the school’s move: it’s clear from their first interaction that she distrusts Leslie pretty much out of hand, being a working single mother whose son is attending Leyland on financial aid. At least one of the photos circulating labels him “WT” — white trash.
That judgment and others shape the early episodes of American Crime‘s new season. Based on fear and rage, these judgments circulate in social media images that define kids’ daily lives and mostly mystify their parents. The show invites our own misapprehension early on: Taylor first spots the pictures as he’s sitting on bleachers in the gym, watching the basketball team practice; the scene cuts between his phone screen and his face and tight mobile frames of boys’ bodies and hands. The lack of context makes it hard to know which comes first, how the images are connected, who wants what. It turns out that the photos are from a basketball team party, to which Taylor had been invited.
These abstracted relationships only become more complicated as they become more material. The basketball team’s hardworking and desperately dedicated coach, Dan (Timothy Hutton), uses his phone at the gym for another purpose, and again, it’s hard to read at first. He’s shooting video of one of the cheerleaders, maybe rehearsing, maybe just bending over in front of his players. Back at Coach’s home, you learn that he’s not just a creepy old man shooting teenagers as they fool around. He’s a creepy old man shooting his daughter, Becca (Sky Azure Van Vliet).
Even as your understanding of possible motives and meanings changes here, Dan’s decision to show the video to his wife and Becca’s mom, Steph (Hope Davis) compounds the confusion. “Why are you taking videos of me?” Becca asks. “You don’t get it.” Right. Dan’s mad that Steph shows the video to Becca, as he was hoping she’d handle it without him in sight, as a “mother-daughter talk”. Steph is mad on all fronts, not getting why her daughter needs “to shake your butt in some boy’s face”, or why her own needs are no longer met, She remembers how she teased boys in high school, passing close to them in the hallways to make them hard, but now, about to turn 50, she observes, “You’ve got five good years and then you die.”
Steph’s sense of loss runs close to Anne’s, as both moms focus on their children as means to move forward (and Steph is apparently repeatedly frustrated by her husband’s habitual focus on “his boys” rather than Becca). Their paths intersect with Terri’s (Regina King) when the story of the pictures shows up in the local newspaper, online. Horrified that her son Kevin (Trevor Jackson) is named, as one of the team’s co-captains, the well-to-do businesswoman Terri presumes help from multiple corners, including her architect husband Michael (André Benjamin), lawyers, and friends on the local police force.
As she marshals those resources, the camera again keeps close on her face, indicating not only her frustration and ferocity, paralleling Anne’s and Steph’s, even as their class differences create wide, impassable divides among them. The women see risk everywhere. This puts Steph at odds with Dan, who, warned to look out for himself by a black coaching assistant (Michael Love Toliver), walks from the gymnasium as if in a grand moral huff, declaring, “I won’t quit on my boys.”
Loss also puts Terri at odds with Michael: she seems to be willing her son to success, knowing that he has to be twice as good as a white child while her husband’s first instinct is to question Kevin. Anne too, can’t make sense of the forces coming at her, from the pep school’s self-interest to her son’s secrets to her own investments (she’s worked so hard to provide options for Taylor, and now this!).
As radically different as any of these perceptions of the world may be, they share what seems an overwhelming anxiety, a fear that their lives are insecure, that their achievements are tenuous. While it’s alarming to hear, from multiple adults, that the alleged crime is impossible because “men can’t get raped” or these “boys would never do that”, what’s most arresting in this intertwining ensemble piece is what can’t be said, what’s seen but missed or misread.
Like John Ridley’s other work, the show is about exactly that, what’s lost in life’s rush, in greed, in selfishness. Here, for all the attention to adult actors in compelling, if sometimes too educational, roles, the emotional focus is on the kids — what they don’t say, what they can’t help but lose, what they don’t know about “what happened”. Unable to talk to each other as well as to their parents and parental stand-ins, the kids look off screen, yearn for havens.
The series makes visible how difficult it is for the kids to process what they see — in adults’ politics and in their parents’ needs, in each other’s faces and on their phones. They have no time to come of age, that quaint notion that was never quite available but once passed for a stage of life. Neither do they have time to be children, whatever that equally quaint phrase might mean.