The Calling Review: An Intriguing Investigation That Comes Up Empty-Handed

Detectives have always made for ideal existential heroes because they’re continually confronted with tragedy and asked to make sense of it. Indeed, in Barry Levinson and David E. Kelley’s The Calling, they aren’t just trying to solve a crime itself, but to answer essential questions about human life in the process.

Avraham Avraham (Jeff Wilbusch) is an NYPD detective and Orthodox Jew whose religious worldview informs every aspect of his life. He believes in the absolute preciousness of human life, no matter how grim or absurd it might seem. In the opening episode, directed by Levinson, Avraham is assigned to solve a manslaughter case involving a man in a hotdog costume, drawing a confession out of the perpetrator by empathizing with him as a human being. He relates to the man’s sense of anger and indignity, reaches through his protective layers of denial and deceit, and gets at the part of him that knows that he’s done wrong and desperately wants to admit it. And he does all this in about five minutes.

It’s an excellent setup, combining the mystery-solving fun of a police procedural with deeper, First Reformed-style philosophical questions about what it means to be a person whose faith isn’t just a weekend activity, but the driving force of their day-to-day life. More specifically, it asks whether such faith in mankind can survive the daily onslaught of horrors that detective work provides and whether it might even be an impediment to doing the job.

Revolving around a pair of missing-person cases, and filled with clever misdirects and red herrings, The Calling is structurally similar to Mare of Easttown. Rather than steadily ruling out each potential perp, every new bit of information we receive serves to make someone else look a little more suspicious or adds another confusing connection to the web of evidence. Even when the crime appears solved, there’s another, even more sinister explanation lurking behind it.

The conclusions that eventually reveal themselves, though, prove to be less satisfying than the process of uncovering them. The first case is resolved with a one-two punch of dark revelations and then basically never mentioned again, giving us little chance to process the ugly truths we’ve been confronted with, while the most interesting aspects of the second case fade out as the series wears on. Arguably, this is part and parcel of a mystery story: A solid answer can never be quite as entertaining as the tantalizing unknown. There’s a reason that Pulp Fiction, like Kiss Me Deadly before it, never lets us see what’s in the briefcase.

But the deeper problem with both cases is the way they connect to Avraham’s personal story. Or more accurately, the way they don’t. We start from the position that Avraham’s worldview gives him an unshakeable belief in humanity and basically stay there, as the cases never really challenge that worldview. Wilbusch delivers a performance filled with sly humor and intelligence, but the character never quite lives up to his archetype as a religious man trying to keep his soul intact in the face of daily horrors.

As much as The Calling centers Avraham’s interrogations—with other members of his squad, like new partner Janine (Juliana Canfield), watching on in awe—it’s hard to see what makes him special. He doesn’t appear any more compassionate than his co-workers, as he regularly lies to suspects about the evidence against them in order to force a confession and makes little effort to hide how much he loathes those who are eventually found guilty, which would seem to conflict with his worldview in a way the series never fully explores. By the end, his religion seems more like set dressing than a central part of the character.

The Calling also displays an unwillingness to present the police as anything less than totally heroic. At times, the series seems interested in addressing certain police procedural tropes: It’s consciously ambiguous about whether Avraham’s feeling-driven investigative methods should be treated as quirky genius or irresponsible, and he’s criticized regularly by his colleagues for playing the hero and putting lives at risk. Later, though, the series begins uncritically echoing right-wing talking points about crime, throwing in a police brutality subplot that seems to have been carefully contrived to ensure the officer in question is a blameless victim.

While it never quite goes full Blue Lives Matter, the most disappointing aspect of The Calling is how it squanders the potential it initially had to subvert the standard police power fantasy. Avraham provides a fascinating outline for a protagonist, but it’s one that never really gets properly filled in. The series puts a spiritual spin on the police procedural, carrying out a compelling investigation but ultimately struggling to uncover anything profound.