By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg) – “Crash,” the new Starz series starring Dennis Hopper, is starting to come together. Inspired by the 2005 Oscar-winning movie of the same name, the 13-part series, which debuted in mid-October, started off with several seemingly disconnected story lines. While it’s too early for certainty, one senses some sort of redemption is afoot, featuring a mysterious Guatemalan last seen running toward America in a dead man’s shoes. A strange prediction, but this a strange show. The story to date: Ben Cendars (Hopper), is a music mogul we first encountered as he enjoyed intimacies with himself in the back of his limo. All told, his life is pretty lame. He can’t find any new music he likes and is tired of the current craze, which won’t go away. “Hip hop’s a zombie,” he observes, “and you can’t kill a zombie.” Gray haired, wiry and given to philosophical meanderings, Cenders is also haunted by death, noting “that good dark night” is closing in though he’s not ready to give up his ghost quite yet. Meantime, most of the other characters in the LA-based show, which next airs Friday at 10 p.m. New York time, are caught up in their own dramas, none of which are especially heroic. Christine Emory (Clare Carey) is a horny housewife deeply lusting after a new kitchen, among other things. Her husband, a real estate shark named Peter (D.B. Sweeney), instructs her that this is “not the time to be asking for a raise on your allowance.” In a bow to tradition, Christine squeezes a commitment out of him the old fashioned way. We assume she’s warming up for other conquests. The crisply written series also features corrupt and philandering cops Axel Finet (Nick E. Tarabay) and Kenny Battaglia (Ross McCall), a paramedic named Eddie Choi (Brian Tee) who recently left life as a gangbanger, a world-class nympho named Inez (Moran Atias) and, most intriguingly, Cesar Uman (Luis Chavez) a young Guatemalan making his way toward America and enduring hell every step of the way. Last week Cesar was captured by the Mexican police, a gang of meaty thugs who shook him down for his last peso, then attempted to put him on a bus back home. Cesar managed to escape, thanks in part to a pair of shoes he took off a corpse. He was last seen running in the direction of his promised land, where one senses he may change the lives of at least some of the desperate Angelenos. Cendars seems primed for transformation. While initially a mere weirdo with a cashbox for a heart, he is an increasingly sympathetic figure -- lonely, unhealthy, and now determined to make a rap star out of his limo driver, Anthony Adams (Jocko Sims), despite Anthony’s lack of credentials. “What do you mean you don’t rap?” Cendars asked after lining up a studio session with a local magnate. “I write poetry,” Anthony replied. No matter, the boss declared in fine philosophical feather. “This is Saint Crispin’s Day. True genius is never planned.” Cendars also waxed poetical about how Anthony should “feel the beat of the African Diaspora cruising through your veins,” underscoring a habit of sending illicit substances through his own bloodstream. “My clarity is crystal until the devil offers his confections,” he tells Anthony, and there are plenty of demons in Los Angeles, one of whom lights Cendars during the recording session. “I’m dying,” a deeply stoned Ben utters at the end of last week’s show. “This is what death looks like.” Yet maybe help is on the way, wearing resurrected shoes. Or maybe Cesar is Cendars’s love child. The show, though quirky, is worth watching to learn weird Ben’s fate. (Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
