Lights go out on "Lights Out"

The series finale of “Lights Out” aired this past week and I’m sorry but mostly what it did was highlight the inadequacy of the subject matter to ground a series.

Don’t get me wrong. Holt McCallany as Patrick “Lights” Leary has worked every step of the way to make this show about something larger than his character. His good-natured world heavyweight champion robbed of his title in a decision five years before has a huge heart. He’s got three daughters who mean the world to him, he’s got a loving, supportive wife, he’s got a brother, a father and a sister all of whom depend on him in some way. If anyone was going to be the star of an FX drama, well, the cameras would absolutely be following him around.

What we were less clear about was his moral center. He’d started taking some enforcer jobs as the muscle in collections and repossession. He’d delivered bribes for people, and if he hadn’t had the presence of mind to recognize the situations he was in – which seemed a bit out of the character he was presenting – he could’ve gone to jail for doing so. That is, one of his bribe-takers was wearing a wire to implicate him in his role in delivering the bribe, trying to get at the person making the bribe. Wow, you can only say “bribe” so many times before the word loses all meaning. But he recognized how he was being set up and mostly escaped the situation unscathed.

Meanwhile, whatever damage was done to the government of whatever was done. That’s not really Lights’ concern.

But in the series finale he reflected on all of these transgressions, and before he stepped into the ring for a rematch, he went to confession, where the priest, speaking for God, absolved him and declared him to be a good man. I’m not certain a 200-pound chunk of killing machine beating the crap out of some rich jerk half his size who owes someone money is necessarily the work of a good man, but it’s probably been nine or 10 episodes since that happened and he’s been so charming ever since.

What he was actually there for was .. OK, yes, he felt really bad about that. But he also felt bad about making his daughter keep a secret about his concerns about pugilist dementia. The priest absolved him of that, too.

And then he went toe-to-toe with Death Row Reynolds, the fight this entire season has been leading up to. All of the rhetoric, the repetitive “I’ll get you!” “Not if I get you first!” televised showdowns, Barry the promoter is evil and some other interloper, trying to draw Lights under his management, promises a better life for the boxers in his care, maybe even setting up a health insurance plan for the boxers. But darn the luck the interloper had made some other boxer take a dive against Leary, and the whole question of what’s honorable and what’s not, well, that was what this came down to.

And I can’t completely understand the little kabuki dance being done between the interloper and the referee regarding the doctor during the fight, because when they brought the presumably corrupt doctor forward, he cleared Lights to continue the fight, when before it seemed like the ref was calling every technicality he could on Lights and giving Reynolds a free and clear pass.

So no, I don’t really have a clear sense of who was corrupt and who wasn’t, which honestly I think is part of the point, just like Lights, in a post-victory daze, post beating Reynolds to a standing-up corpse, wondering who, in fact, had won.

Who won? The clear message of the show is the promoters won. The boxers give their bodies and their minds and quite large amounts of their purse to the promoters, who simply deposit a check and live grand, fancy lives while the boxers themselves fade to obscurity.That’s where Lights was at the beginning of the show, before he could convince Reynolds and Barry to a rematch, he was appearing at kids birthday parties. Other boxers were stuck flogging memorablia at flea markets, coping with broken minds and being terrifying cautionary examples.

“Lights Out” is generally a show about how bad the business of boxing is, but that in itself doesn’t make it interesting. The camera followed an honorable man around the process of readying himself for a heavyweight fight. It might have been a stronger show if we’d seen some not-honorable men. One character in the show was this young boxer who was really believing all the hype about himself. He was juicing, he had a theme song, he had an entourage … in short, he was no-one that Pops Leary would’ve wasted a minute on in his old-school gym with the adage “Pain is temporary. Triumph is forever” looming on the wall. “It’s not supposed to feel good” is Pops Leary’s take on training.

Instead, Lights had to be the honorable man and the vaguely dishonorable man. His brother set them up with a couple of floozies once and Lights got in a car accident taking one of them home. Then his brother pulled the police record. It’s like jeez, the man is surrounded with corruption, yet he himself remains pure and perfect. He must be the Pope over here.

Plus, he overtrains, he gets injured, he gets stabbed, he gets his life taken over by some wacko trainer, his mom comes back from years of absence and tries to run a con on him. He’s a little too good or everyone around him is a little too bad but ultimately it shakes out that there was some “Say it ain’t so” wish-fulfillment going on in the making of this show.

Patrick “Lights” Leary is a everyman hero, an underdog hungry for a shot at redemption. He gets it, and finds that it really hasn’t changed much of anything. Which is more than a lot of stories get in this cancel-happy age, but I think it could’ve been a stronger story and it could’ve been going somewhere bigger. Rest in peace, little show.

The correction file

I’ve got to cut out early again this week but first I have been making a lot of bonehead mistakes that I need to fess up to. I recently referred to Thomas on “The Event” as Paul. I also identified Emily Prentiss on “Criminal Minds” as Ellen.

And when I talked about the citation of “The Taming of the Shrew” on “Mad Love” that hadn’t actually happened. Instead, it was an episode of that week’s “The Big Bang Theory” where Leonard and Rajesh’s sister Priya quoted a snippet of dialogue between Kate and Petruchio. My bad. I’m afraid when I watch a whole slug of television at a time there’s a danger it all blends together while I’m picking out things to comment about.

And I completely forgot to cite Walter Bishop’s drug-induced storytelling on “Fringe” in my musical commentary on “Grey’s Anatomy” although in my defense, I’d not seen it until it was a repeat this past week. Also, having seen it – stylized and steampunky tho it was – I can totally understand why everyone is on “Let us never speak of this again” mode regarding that episode.

Finally, I challenge Joel McHale, who made mad, merry fun of the musical installment of “Grey’s Anatomy” on “The Soup” this week to turn a cold, dispassionate eye toward his stop-motion animated Christmas episode of “Community” before he cast any further aspersions, in that it can hardly be said to have been any better – and indeed, it was probably about half as good, if maybe for only about half as long. And again, anything that puts Sara Ramirez’ voice in front of a national audience is to be celebrated.

Coming up

Beyond that, FOX premiered “Breaking In” this past week, which I imagine I’ll get to see sometime soon. My community theater production “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” closed today and I will be cleaning out my DVR for awhile. My prep for this production has probably contributed to some of the errors of late and my fondest wish is that I can now reclaim some of my brain for use in putting these commentaries together. I will say, however, that it was an absolute blast while it was going on, and a truly outstanding group of people to work with.

Comedy Central is premiering the “Sports Show with Norm MacDonald” on Tuesday, ABC is premiering “Happy Endings” Wednesday (in the space formerly occupied by “Cougar Town” and then “Mr. Sunshine,” so no I’m not necessarily happy about that. The placeholder title “The Paul Reiser Show” is premiering Thursday night on NBC, so that must have been a nice 12-year vacation for Mr. “Bye-Bye Love.” Welcome back, Mr. Reiser. ;)

Otherwise, gotta get this thing in the feed so I can get some sleep after what has proved to be one heck of a weekend. Happy viewing.