I kind of feel that, despite having wandered in and out of serious fannish love for it over the years, and despite the possibility that they might yet blow it by whiffing the ending, White Collar may end up being one of the handful of shows that I really feel good about, all the way through. (This despite being well aware that it's got a number of problems, not the least being some serious writing flaws and a really frustrating lack of background casting diversity, especially with the female characters ...)
But it's got such a lovely cast, for all the reasons you outlined above, and there's another thing about White Collar which is vanishingly rare on TV crime shows -- it's a show that consistently feels ... well-intentioned, I guess? I noticed sometime around season three that the show has never had an actual rape or even a rape threat, has never had a sexualized female corpse, has never had a damsel in distress who didn't actively participate in her own rescue ... and has never disappointed me on any of these things going forward. There's Jones being the team's resident computer geek, and Diana and Jones both having middle-class to upper-class backgrounds; there's Mozzie competently delivering Diana's baby and not freaking out because omg guys freaking out about women in labor is so funny amirite??; there's the way that Peter's traditional masculinity exists side-by-side with Neal's or Mozzie's way of performing masculinity without ever being threatened by it ...
There are a lot of things I wish the show would do that it hasn't and won't, and PLENTY of places the writing falls down, but switching to most other crime shows feels like a sort of ... culture shift, I guess, after getting used to White Collar's general niceness. And yeah, there are times when I'd rather have dark and gritty and actual consequences and story arcs that make sense, but there's something I just appreciate so much about White Collar's sweet blue-sky world and their darling little found family of cops and robbers.
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I kind of feel that, despite having wandered in and out of serious fannish love for it over the years, and despite the possibility that they might yet blow it by whiffing the ending, White Collar may end up being one of the handful of shows that I really feel good about, all the way through. (This despite being well aware that it's got a number of problems, not the least being some serious writing flaws and a really frustrating lack of background casting diversity, especially with the female characters ...)
But it's got such a lovely cast, for all the reasons you outlined above, and there's another thing about White Collar which is vanishingly rare on TV crime shows -- it's a show that consistently feels ... well-intentioned, I guess? I noticed sometime around season three that the show has never had an actual rape or even a rape threat, has never had a sexualized female corpse, has never had a damsel in distress who didn't actively participate in her own rescue ... and has never disappointed me on any of these things going forward. There's Jones being the team's resident computer geek, and Diana and Jones both having middle-class to upper-class backgrounds; there's Mozzie competently delivering Diana's baby and not freaking out because omg guys freaking out about women in labor is so funny amirite??; there's the way that Peter's traditional masculinity exists side-by-side with Neal's or Mozzie's way of performing masculinity without ever being threatened by it ...
There are a lot of things I wish the show would do that it hasn't and won't, and PLENTY of places the writing falls down, but switching to most other crime shows feels like a sort of ... culture shift, I guess, after getting used to White Collar's general niceness. And yeah, there are times when I'd rather have dark and gritty and actual consequences and story arcs that make sense, but there's something I just appreciate so much about White Collar's sweet blue-sky world and their darling little found family of cops and robbers.