'Terriers': You Can Read Proust | PopMatters:
Hank’s a private detective in San Diego, unlicensed. As such, he lives on a familiar kind of edge, the kind negotiated by ex-cops and recovering alcoholics. In the smart new FX series, Terriers, Hank has a few other accoutrements you’ve seen before—an ex-wife, Gretchen (Kimberly Quinn), whom he still loves, and an ex-partner, Detective Mark Gustafson (Rockmond Dunbar), whom he still trusts. He’s also got a scruffy new partner in his new detecting business, one-time thief, Britt (Michael Raymond-James). .. While the show provides some standard-seeming villains—expensively outfitted and imperious—it also pits Hank and Britt against or in league with a number of less obvious types, including Hank’s sister Steph (played by Logue’s own sister Karina Logue). When she shows up in the fourth episode, she helps to stretch your understanding of him, as he copes with her unexpected decision to go off her meds and exit the hospital where she’s been living. But she’s not just the crazy sister. Instead, Steph (an MIT grad) offers another view of Hank, in glimpses of their shared past and in her independent mind, made visible in frame compositions that tell story as well as dialogue. So, when he asks Gretchen to look after her for an afternoon, Steph walks through the background of their conversation in the kitchen, reminding them that she can hear them and reciting the “rules” concerning her care: “Don’t leave her around any sharp objects, don’t let her read any Proust,” she says, her figure out of focus as Hank and Gretchen also understand their parts in this knotty, multi-part relationship. “Never take her to the wild animal park, never serve her red wine with fish, blah blah, blah, blah, blah.” like the rules for gizmo so he doesn't lead to Gremlins, right. As Steph observes here, social propriety is arbitrary, no matter whom it’s designed to contain. “You can read Proust. Alright?” he says.

mmm. makes me feel better. partly bcs I am a less crazy sister, there are not rules for me (though maybe I'd like that = caretaking, someone else managing me, in charge) and partly bcs I like him a lot and he's good to her.


Hank’s own excesses, his steps outside such propriety, take a variety of forms. Britt has scenes apart from Hank—mostly with his incredibly insightful and patient girlfriend Katie (Lauren Allen)—but for the most part the show keeps you inside Hank’s experience. This means you see him share a particular language and sensibility with Steph, worry about Gretchen’s upcoming marriage to Jason (Loren Dean), and confess to his AA meeting that he’s buying their old house from her. When a fellow member advises against it—“You’ll be living in a museum of all your past mistakes”—the look on Hank’s face simultaneously conveys his agreement with this assessment, his lifetime of regret, and also his enduring optimism.
Like co-creator Shawn Ryan’s The Shield, Terriers features charismatic, complicated grown-ups wrestling with a lot of past mistakes, even as they continue to make them. Though Hank and Britt are accused repeatedly of behaving childishly, they know enough to see what they’re doing, and measure it against other so-called adult behavior (say, cheating on land development projects or following proper investigative procedures). Guys who’ve gone wrong now trying to go straight, they value loyalty and intelligence. So, when Mark warns Britt, “You gotta know he’s gonna let you down, it is not in Hank Dolworth to do anything but self-destruct on people and when he does, everybody catches shrapnel,” the new partner nods and listens, but takes the risk.