Ah, there’s nothing I love more than when a series up and decides that after so long of promoting a series with dual leads, one of them a woman, they’ll randomly go in another direction and kill the woman off in the process.
And by “love,” obviously, I mean I hate it. It’s such a problematic and frustrating ordeal that I find it insulting to the audience, yet networks dip into this well frequently.
The latest to partake in this particular bad habit is Alert: MPU.
Here’s the thing: If there was a narrative reason for a prominent death in a series, then obviously, that’s fine. It devastates viewers, of course, but when it’s instrumental to the story arc and what comes next, most viewers are more than willing to roll with it.
However, that isn’t what happens most of the time. When I witnessed the appalling way FOX’s Alert wrote out Dania Ramirez’s Nikki Batista, I wasn’t devastated by her death, heartbroken, or even filled with rage.
If anything, I was incredibly annoyed. The series executed it so poorly that there was no ability to feel anything over this death. It seemingly came out of nowhere, and everything about the ordeal felt forced.
When you’ve been watching television for years, you can usually figure out when something is amiss, even if you’re not nosey enough to want to figure out what. But regardless of the reasons for her sudden departure, to pretend as if it’s worthwhile is where FOX misses me.
It’s also where it reminds me of how upsetting it was when Sleepy Hollow killed off Abbie Mills.
Are Alert: MPU and Sleepy Hollow of the same caliber? No. And I can’t even say I loved Nikki a quarter as much as I love Abbie Mills.
But it is irksome that a network can justify or rationalize killing off a female lead by claiming it’s a creative decision. The series is headed in a new direction, and the network will revamp or essentially change everything about the show as if it’s positive.
Killing off your female lead to prop up or expand storyline potential for the male ones is an archaic, insipid tactic that merely backfires, and I thought we were past this.
Sleepy Hollow spent three seasons with Abbie and Ichabod’s dynamic at the center of the series. They sold the idea that their fates were intertwined and connected Abbie’s history and ancestry with Ichabod in this compelling, intricate manner that had viewers hooked.
NOTHING about that series implied that it was only Ichabod’s show or that the series didn’t entirely hinge on the two serving as a unit.
But the second Nicole Beharie exited the series, Sleepy Hollow goes out of its way to rewrite its own canon, lore, and history to suggest that somehow, Abbie wasn’t worthwhile or that she was merely a chapter in a larger story for Ichabod.
Then, they brought in another character to serve as his partner, as if Abbie was replaceable, and that solved everything.
The thought process is always that killing off a female lead will open up opportunities for the other characters and allow the story to branch out in new, fresh ways.
They often tell viewers that pushing the series into a new creative direction is necessary, but this begs the question: Who the hell asked for a series to go in a different direction in the first place?
With Alert’s murder of Nikki, the powers that be once again are feeding viewers this same message. Somehow, they expect us to roll with her death and embrace a new era of this series because it allows them to head into a different direction creatively and narratively.
But one of the biggest issues with Alert: MPU in the first place is how it shifted from its entertaining Keith Mystery in the first season to a run-of-the-mill procedural in the second season in the first place.
We also remarked many times during Alert: MPU Season 2 that the season spent a lot of time sidelining Nikki in favor of Jason and Mike’s buddy-cop antics.
She disappeared in Alert’s sophomore season, as the show shifted from a family drama with police elements to an outright quirky police procedural centering on two bickering guys.
Somehow, the rather unusual but quirky enough unofficial “throuple” angle of Nikki working alongside her ex-husband and her new one, balancing out their work life with a complex blended family one, vanished. What ever happened to Nikki and Jason’s daughter?
Instead, they kept pushing us into the same repetitive buddy-cop trope, perhaps harkening back to Scott Caan’s days in Hawaii Five-0.
In hindsight, we see why, as with Nikki’s death, which was shockingly understated for both characters, that’s precisely what Alert: MPU becomes. It’s another series, not unlike Lethal Weapon, where two partners with opposite approaches, one of them grieving, solve crime and wisecrack with each other.
Oh, and if you think Alert: MPU is escaping the same tired process of replacing their established female lead with a carbon copy, NOPE, we’re getting that, too! Yay.
But who asked for this? Not only is it frustrating that series make female leads expendable, shoving them out or killing them off as they deem fit to further the storylines of mostly male characters, but then they repurpose a series altogether.
Why completely change the direction of a series creatively when it’s not what people anticipated when they tuned in?
Alert: MPU keeps straying further away from why people watched in the first place, and Nikki’s death in an attempt to revamp the series (assuming we ever buy that excuse) feels like one last slap in the face.
Over to you, Alert: MPU Fanatics. How annoying is this tired development? Did anyone else get Sleepy Hollow vibes? Let’s discuss below!
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