It doesn't matter how many phony shoot-outs you do as an actor. Nothing prepares you for the real deal. "There's smoke in the air and I can see it and taste it," Jason Clarke says with reverence in his voice. He's recalling one of the many ride-alongs he was on with Chicago law enforcement in preparation to play a detective on The Chicago Code, Fox's new cop drama from The Shield creator Shawn Ryan. "Our car pulls up and there's a guy on the ground. He's been shot. It's nighttime. We're outside a church. My heart is pounding and my mind is going, 'What the hell am I doing here?'"
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Cheers to Delroy Lindo for his magnificent performance on The Chicago Code.
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The Chicago Code (Monday, 9/8c, Fox)
As often happens in the best crime dramas, the bad guy often gets some of the meatiest material. And Ronin Gibbons, the Chicago Alderman played so deliciously by Delroy Lindo, is no ordinary adversary. We get a better sense of what makes him tick in this episode, when the powerful politician is confronted by an armed teenage robber, causing Gibbons to look back on his own upbringing, back before he became so cynical about the city's corrupt ways. In another storyline, a bomber blows up a city building and promises more mayhem, putting a ticking clock on Jarek and Caleb's efforts to track down the culprit. This situation is not unlike the dilemma on ABC's Castle an hour later (10/9c), in the conclusion of a tense two-parter that finds Beckett and Castle teaming up with a fed (Adrian Pasdar) to avert a terrorist calamity....
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On the other end of the phone, Jennifer Beals is reading a Carl Sandburg poem titled "Chicago." Scratch that — she's performing it.
The poem celebrates Chicago's blue-collar work ethic as what trumps portrayals of the city as a corrupt, dangerous place to live. It's the best way for Beals, a Windy City native and star of Fox's The Chicago Code, to explain how she — and her character, Police Superintendent Teresa Colvin — feel about the place they call home.
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Cheers to The Chicago Code for unleashing the bear inside Jason Clarke.
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The Australian actor is probably best known to American audiences as Tommy Caffee, the velvet-glove politician to Jason Isaacs' iron-fisted sibling Michael on Showtime's late, great Brotherhood. But as detective Jarek Wysocki in Fox's Windy City cop drama, he blows through crime scenes like a man on a tornado-like mission to uproot corruption. He's an instantly fascinating character, and Clarke charges him with kinetic energy.
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