MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "THE EQUALIZER"

Don't do something you won't live to regret. -- Robert McCall

As a writer, there is nothing more interesting to me than when somebody comes up with a new way to do an old thing. To tell a well-worn story in a manner that feels fresh and interesting. To come at a familiar place from an angle nobody tried before. THE EQUALIZER (1985 - 1989) was such a television series. It took one of the oldest tropes in the game, that of the "vigilante with a heart of gold," and turned it sideways -- with panache. For that reason we shall shake the dust of our own neighborhoods and take a little night walk through the cold, lamp-lit windblown streets of New York city...via Memory Lane.

I bought the entire series of THE EQUALIZER on a nostalgic whim. I hadn't seen an episode in decades and had quite forgotten whether the show was actually good or whether I was simply remembering it that way. And indeed, my initial feeling after watching a few episodes was regret. Viewing THE EQUALIZER is rather like putting an ice cube in your mouth. The initial reaction is discomfort, and a realization that no, you can't eat these things like candy. You have to spend time letting them warm up before you can enjoy the experience. And just as you wouldn't eat a tray of ice cubes, you probably won't binge-watch this show. To that extent it's like THE X-FILES: meant to be consumed slowly and thoroughly over a long period of time.

The conceit of THE EQUALIZER is this. Robert McCall (the majestic Edward Woodward) spent decades in the spy game before retiring to New York City. Although considered a legend in the business – his former boss calls him “the most dangerous man I have ever met” – the dapper, cultured McCall has little to show for his life's work. He's bitterly divorced, semi-estranged from his son Scott (William Zabka), and troubled by the terrible moral compromises he's had to make. To wash this foul taste from the palate of his conscience, McCall decides he is going to work pro bono as a kind of high-end vigilante. Advertising in the paper as a man who can help the helpless and fight for the little guy, he meets a variety of people in desperate need and uses all of his skills to see that justice is done on their behalf. But what differentiates THE EQUALIZER from what you'd assume would be its premise is that McCall is not a violent man by nature. In fact, he looks harmless and rather cuddly: short, silver-haired, slightly pudgy, sporting a cultured English accent and a fondness for good whisky, classical music and tasteful art. He can use a gun, and does whenever it's necessary, but his general approach is psychological. The ordinary episode goes like this:

A person is being stalked, terrorized, extorted, threatened, etc. by a much more powerful and dangerous person, or group.

They go to the cops, who either can't or won't help. Enter the Equalizer.

McCall circles his opponent for a while, learning his past and weaknesses, then confronts him and demands he/she/they back off.

Instead, they only up their harassment and menacing of the victim.

While forming his plan, McCall usually notices problems within the victim's own personal relationships, family, etc. and tries to fix them, often using “tough love” arguments. In doing this he often examples his own failed marriage and fatherhood, or the guilt he feels over his time with The Company.

Using his contacts from The Company, most notably the dead-eyed and dangerous ex-Navy SEAL Mickey Kostmeyer (Keith Szarabajka), McCall develops a case history and psychological profile of his enemy, and uses it to wage psy-war ops on the poor shmoe until they crack. He rarely slays his victims, instead leaving them broken and compromised, or in the hands of the police.

He repairs to his townhouse for a drink, some Bach, and a book on South American art.

Obviously not all the shows followed this formula. A number are dedicated to McCall's troubled relationship with his former employers, most notably his boss, best friend, and occasional nemesis Control (Robert Lansing). Control is an excellent character, charming and brilliant, yet morally ambiguous and fork-tongued, and whenever he shows up, you know there are international intrigues afoot that will drag Robert back into the spy-world. Other episodes feature McCall's generally disastrous personal life, or the appearance of some wanted (or unwanted) person from his own dark past. One very memorable story, for example, revolves around Randall Payne, the man who murdered his father. Another forces McCall to confront his own deeply-held belief that he is going to hell when he dies.

THE EQUALIZER is an unusual show in more ways than its choice of lead actor (a pudgy, gray-haired, dapper Englishman rather than a young, rip-muscled American stud), or the fact that his methods are more cerebral than violent in nature. It is an intelligent, thoughtful, oddly civilized series that explores the nature of evil from the viewpoint man who is not evil, but understands evil uncomfortably well, because of all the damage he has done, and thirsts for a redemption which may not be possible...because, after all, to fight evil, McCall must frequently blackmail, extort, terrorize and even sometimes kill his opponents. The notorious episode “Nightscape” (Season 2) pits McCall against a trio of vicious rapists who prowl the subways. The episode is handled from the angle of the damage that rape does to the victims and their loved ones, but also in the sense that McCall is trying to prevent the husband from becoming a vigilante. This creates a tension in the episode which resolves in an act of brutal, cold-blooded, but thoroughly satisfying multiple murder, and sets THE EQUALIZER apart from almost any other show on television during its era. While not an action show pe se, when it did depict violence, it was often brutally done. “China Rain” (Season 1) or “Prisoners of Conscience” (Season 4) shocked me as a kid (as did “Nightscape”) because this was no A-TEAM fairy tale where bullets don't kill anyone, a beating is shrugged off in the next scene, and even torture leaves no more consequence to the victim than a barked shin. No, sir. The people who die on THIS show stay dead, and the people who live are sometimes scarred for life or visibly haunted. It's pretty dark at times, but in that sense hardly unrealistic. In short, THE EQUALIZER, while often violent, did not glorify violence or pretend it came free of consequences. It emphatically rejected the Tarantino-esque thesis that bloody vengeance is something which must be sought for its own sake and viewed as a thing-in-itself, its own alpha and omega. On the contrary: it made a point, a repeated point at that, in explaining that blood does not wash off so easily.

Aside from this, and the iconic score by Stewart Copeland of The Police, there are three factors which make THE EQUALIZER really stand out. One is the show's relationship to New York City during the 80s. Beautifully shot, the cinematography depicts both the beauty and the decay of the Big Apple, shying away from neither. Virtually the whole of T.E. was filmed on location, almost nothing in the studio. It gives us a picture of mid-80s NYC which is almost impossible to find anywhere else, a sort of time-capsule from my own boyhood. The other is the absolutely staggering number of up-and-coming actors who appeared as guest stars or recurring roles who later became famous actors in their own right. A very short random sampling would include Michael Wincott, Laura San Giacomo, Alberta Watson, John Goodman, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Lawrence Fishburne, James Remar, Michael Rooker, Richard Jordan, Saul Rubinek, William Atherton, Vincent D'Nofrio, J.T. Walsh, Tony Shaloub, Michael Moriarty, Ving Rhames, Vitamin C, Patricia Richardson, Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Gray, Dan Hedaya, Jenny Agutter, Christian Slater, Will Patton, Keith David, Brad Dourif and John Heard. You will also recognize all of McCall's ably-played company sidekicks.

The last factor? Cinematography and lighting. The star of THE EQUALIZER is Woodward, but his co-star is New York City itself. The word "lush" can be used to describe the visual painting that is a lot of the camera work: especial use is made of both light and (not surprisingly) shadow. As I said before, there's no attempt to glamorize the wormy Big Apple, but the camera shows us both worms and fruit in a way that's easy to admire and impossible to forget.

THE EQUALIZER is, of course, not perfect television, even for the times. It can be horribly sappy and cheesy (“Reign of Terror” from Season 1, for example, is just awful) and at other times overly stylized or just plain preposterous. The methods McCall uses to psychologically destroy or just exact tricked confessions out of criminals are sometimes so involved as to defy all belief, and there are other episodes where one just wonders why the crooks don't go after McCall more aggressively since he rather than their victims are the source of their real problems. In the 87 – 88 season, Woodward's heart attack limited his role on the show for a time, and the producers tapped Robert Mitchum to sub for him for a few episodes: this was a good decision, but instead of using Szarabajka as his side-kick, they brought in Richard Jordan to play Harley Gage for ten episodes. Jordan is a fine actor but was miscast as a tough guy, and seemed to know it, and to resent it: these episodes don't work all that well, and when Jordan disappears without explanation, my sense as a viewer was, “What the hell was that all about?"

THE EQUALIZER had just wrapped its fourth season when it was abruptly canceled, one season short of what was then considered the minimum length for syndication. It turns out the cancelation had nothing to do with ratings, it was simply an act of spite by the network. To quote Quora:

The ratings for THE EQUALIZER had never been great, but it attracted the right demographic and performed well enough in its timeslot for CBS to renew the series for a fifth season. However, this all went sideways when the negotiations between CBS and Universal Television over the renewal of MURDER SHE WROTE turned hostile. Angela Lansbury’s five-year contract had expired, and the 63 year-old actress wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to continue with the punishing workload of carrying a weekly TV series. CBS very much wanted to keep its highly-rated whodunit on the air. To make that happen, the network was forced to make concessions to Universal that it really did not want to make. Having to capitulate to Universal to keep Jessica Fletcher busy solving mysteries on Sunday nights did not go down well with the network execs, so—to prove they were still big, tough guys—CBS decided to punish the studio by reneging on the already announced renewal of THE EQUALIZER. So, in the end, it wasn’t poor ratings or health concerns that ended THE EQUALIZER, it was Hollywood petulance and backstabbing.

As you all know, I saw -- from the ground level, where the economic impact is really felt -- a lot of this behavior myself when I was working in Tinseltown: and that brings us to the part where I say, "So where does this leave us? What is the legacy of THE EQUALIZER? What can we learn from it? Does it stand the test of time?"

Let's address the first point first for a change. I mentioned up top that THE EQUALIZER was in my estimation a new take on an old scene. I stand by that. The "vigilante movie" semi-craze of the 70s and 80s usually depicted men who had been violently wronged wreaking bloody personal vengeance. This show approached the problem of "is there no justice?" in a different way. The wronged men (and women) of T.E. did not practice vengeance, they enlisted it, in the form of the dapper little McCall. And McCall, unlike, say, Chuck Bronson's Paul Kersey, did not exterminate the evildoers with a typhoon of hot lead. He hit them in their psychological pressure points, like some epigram-spouting, white-haired kung-fu master, taking pleasure not in their pain, but the in the destruction of their power to inflict further evil. If he had to kill, McCall's look of angry disgust told the story. In one episode, when a beautifully conceived, carefully-laid trap ends with an unexpected fatality, he rages at the triggerman: "Nobody was supposed to die!" McCall's ultimate motive was not destruction but reclamation: of his own soul, the peace of mind of his clients, and justice itself. Whether McCall used the sword or his mind, however, is less important than the fact that such a figure -- a redresser of wrongs -- figures prominently in the mythical architecture of Western society. From Robin Hood to Paul Kersey, from Dirty Harry to Batman, we have always needed what Orwell called "an everyman to give the wicked rich man a sock on the jaw." He added, however, that such escapist mythology was rooted in "the need to vicariously get one over on the people who are getting over on you in real life." And this is where our question about legacy groweth deep.

I'm tempted to say THE EQUALIZER's legacy lies in the fact it's undergone two full-dress reboots in the last decade, one cinematic, one episodic; but I'm uninterested in these flabby modern takes on the unmatchable original. Its real legacy is a two-sided coin: the first that it proved that it is possible for a thoughtful, well-acted, usually very well-written series to exist in a genre of storytelling marked by tough guy dialog, spent shell casings and gallons of stage blood. The second is that there is no bottom to the spite of The Suits, the network and studio executives who always come to mind when I hear Don Henley sing the lyric: "These days a man makes you something, but you never see his face; and there is no hiding place." The real wire-pullers of our collective destiny, be they political or industrial or medical-pharmaceutical or anything else, are, as C.S. Lewis noted, "admin." They have scrubbed fingernails and wear ties and carry briefcases and sit in air-conditioned boardrooms, and they decide our destinies from a distance and in total anonymity. And contrary to what you might think, their motive is not money but domination -- the exercise of ultimate power, the more abitrary and spiteful, the better. And their power really is ultimate: a hundred criminals came at Robert McCall and failed. They made him disappear with the stroke of a pen.

I don't want to end this stroll through Memory Lane on a down note, because however grim it might have been, and however much its fate may have gone against the grain of its message,the series was ultimately about hope, about the triumph of the little man over the big man, the individual against the system. So let me say that for all of its flaws, THE EQUALIZER was a damn good show. Maybe a bit too ponderous, a bit too rigidly formulaic and uneven in execution to be truly great, but enormously enjoyable both as a dark lover letter to New York and as a celebration of what a great actor – Edward Woodward – could do with a thoughtful, well-written part that was willing to take risks both with its storylines and its characters. Like NYC itself, it's both ugly and beautiful, tough and curiously sincere. So, if you've got a probem..if the odds are against you...give the gentleman a call. Because hell, if all men were created equal, we wouldn't need The Equalizer.