Crossing Jordan: apparently, Mississippi's still burning. Yankees apply inside.

[Ogre]

What the fuck was that piece of shit? I expected them - maybe - to take an opportunity to make a statement about regional stereotypes. after all, every time Jordan or one of the other characters turned around, they were bemoaning that the old bigoted redneck had somehow gotten away with the murder for forty years…in spite of the fact that there was no evidence.

It practically screamed “We’re barking up the wrong tree, and we’re telegraphing the fact! Foreshadowing! Foreshadowing!”

But no, in the end, the po’ back’ards South needed the educated, cosmopolitan Yankees to come in and solve the case (in two days! Suthunuhs is dumb! M-O-O-N! That spells stoopid!,) and the old bigoted redneck did indeed do it.

And Jordan dispenses some karmic justice in the form of the most cringeworthily dumbassed apology (apology! Not an arrest, an APOLOGY!) scene imaginable. “Sorry for killin’ yore husband ma’am. Won’t do it again. Shucks. Darn. I’da gotten away with it too if it hadn’t been for these hyar smart Yankees.”

Par for the course, the Southern people were two-dimensional cutouts. There was the coal-hearted redneck murderer (“That gun’s for huntin’ coons! A-haw a-haw!”), the old seersucker suit-wearin’ country doctor, the dumber’n Roscoe P. Coltrane desk cop (“Yew jest hold yer horses, now. I’m a-takin’ mah time.”) Even the murdered man’s wife was nothing but a resigned, oppressed Aunt Jemima black woman cliche. She wore a head bandana, for god’s sake!

So I repeat, WHAT THE FUCK?

I mean, does someone connected to the show really, really not like the South?

[Sampiro]

This reminds me of a beef I had with the movie Mississippi Burning and some other “cops come down to the South and outsmart the southerners” movies purportedly based on actual events. There was no major detective work involved in the case: the FBI spread some money around to the clan and an informant told them where the bodies were, same as in the Beckwith case and other murders. While not as interesting from the dramatic point of view, it’s actually a greater indictment of that strata of southern society.

(I had an interest in the movie MB because when I was little my family lived in Lafayette, AL for two years, the town where it was filmed. I remember watching one of the moon landings there on a TV set atop a coffin [the antebellum house where we lived had once been a funeral home and there was “inventory” left on all three floors] at the second floor landing of a rickety spiral staircase. What was interesting is that even though we left there when I was four, I was able to watch the movie and occasionally go “ooh… that’s Miss Verna’s store”- odd the memory.)