TV Jots

Surfer Girls and Their Drugs

On July 15, A&E premiered its new Benjamin Bratt drama The Cleaner, which stars the Law & Order alum as William Banks, a character based on real-life addiction counselor Warren Boyd. Banks promises God he will help other addicts recover if he’s granted a second chance to live “clean.”

The pilot episode of the series introduced viewers to Banks’ core team members who assist him on handpicked cases: Akani Cuesta (Grace Park), a trash-talking and overly playful rich girl; Arnie Swenton (Esteban Powell), the group’s constantly whining go-to man; and following the death of Banks’ close friend Mickey Efros (Gil Bellows), a used-car dealer named Darnell McDowell (Kevin Michael Richardson), whose brother was saved by Banks.

A promising high school athlete who became a wasted meth addict soon after his father’s death provided the Addict of the Week plot during the pilot episode to demonstrate how Banks and his team resolve the cases they decide to pursue. The storyline was disappointing since it failed to create any sense of urgency or tension, which should be a routine matter on a series that describes its main character as an “extreme” interventionist.

The July 22 second episode “Rag Dolls” fares a little better … at first. Once again, the show focuses on a younger addict, an 18-year-old surfer girl. Her mother approaches Banks for help because intuition tells her something is wrong, although her daughter has passed two drug tests and maintains great grades at school.

Sure enough, after a few contrived scenes where Banks’ associates, working undercover, conveniently find very obvious clues at just the right moment (how can you miss the implications of someone drinking glycerin out of a water bottle?), we learn the teenager and her clearly messed-up best friend are drug mules for a dangerous thug-dealer, played generically by Kevin Alejandro of Ugly Betty, Shark, and the July 17 episode of Burn Notice called “Turn and Burn” (he’s really getting around these days — good for him).

A side storyline has Banks and his wife Melissa (Amy Price-Francis) getting called to their daughter’s Catholic school, where the nun in charge reveals the problem is the little girl’s perfection. The ultimate moral of that plot diversion is that perfection isn’t good since mistakes help human beings mature and develop. You don’t say!

For an episode that starts off on such an intriguing note — with surfer girl in a dark, nondescript bathroom desperately attempting to help another clearly dying girl hang onto life as her messed-up best friend repeatedly warns her to hurry up and leave the girl and the place — “Rag Dolls” ends up being a big disappointment.

If you believe the final scenes, all you have to do to make your life better after a balloon of heroin bursts inside you, nearly causing you to die, is grab a long board — that somebody gave to you as a gift, no less, to acknowledge your surviving the balloon incident — and head to the beach to find a big wave.

Yeah, right. How about a year or two of intensive therapy and a few lectures about being a law-abiding adult instead? This episode is much too cut-and-dry and simplistic to be either entertaining or realistic.

The Verdict: C