The First season of CRACKED had the promise of being something TRULY GREAT and the first of its kind on Canadian TV. The Second Season... not so much...
What I originally loved about the first season the most was how it dealt (almost) unflinchingly with issues of mental illness in an even-handed or even gentle way. Unlike "Law and Order" where the mentally ill are "hooped up" or "generically crazy" or in shows like "Criminal Minds" where mental illness is directly associated with being a super-villain, each of the guest characters is a fully-developed person off the street with a name, life, and profession who is then performed by a great guest-actor giving a frighteningly real depiction of what real mental illness looks like.
Its rare that ANY television show has made me care so much for ALL of its characters. Even the weekly antagonist. I use "antagonist" consciously because originally there were no "villains" in the show at all, just people with the sorts of medical problems that are sadly often found at or near the scene of a violent crime. And at the end of every episode as the dust settles the audience is left just hoping that EVERY character is going to be "okay" at the start of next week's episode. Especially the ones who wake up in hospital about to be told what they'd done...
As someone living with bipolar disorder myself, I can vouch for the accuracy of the portrayals what living with the condition is like in episodes 2 and 7 of the first season. I have been frighteningly near places at like that many times myself and I can hardly imagine being a lawyer or a famous musician on tour on top of it. My own experience with hospitalization, diagnosis, medications and the never-ending battle to realize when and how my thinking is being distorted from within...
...what you see on the screen is all true. That's the most frightening part. The show may be scripted but the diseases and disorders are portrayed true-to-life with honestly NO exaggeration for dramatic purposes I can detect. There are people with mental illness that extreme, and probably even worse.
There are people living with disorders and living through events like what you see in this show, and police and mental health professionals dealing with these exact situations EVERY DAY in cities around the world. With 1 in 6 people suffering from mental illness in Canada, this show represents a conversation we need to have in this country, and around the world, about mental illness.
...And then there was Season 2.
I had sincerely hoped that as the show wore on there would be increased mention of the shortage of beds, three-month wait times for intake appointments to outpatient programs, psychiatrists with literally hundreds of patients and more than a few relapses and returns of characters we'd seen before as the overburdened system revolving-doors patients who don't seek help on their own.
No such luck.
At least in part due to the departure of series co-creator Tracy Forbes and an inter-season power grab by series lead David Sutcliffe, the show watered down the groundbreaking aspects of the series in favour of a more "traditional" police procedural format that focused on the cops, and reduced the "ill" back into the "generically crazy" ghetto. The guest characters became rote and forgettable, the writing and acting (generally) became weaker and more clichéd over time. Essentially everything I happened to love about the show has fallen through the Cracks as of the end of Season 2.
That said, check out the show for yourself and see what you think. This series started out as something too good to miss. I hope it can be so again.
