The Adventures of Max and Cole
WILD CARDS – created by Michael Konyves (limited spoilers)
Cole
Police Detective Cole Ellis (Giacomo Gianniotti) has a new sidekick, and he’s not sure it’s a good thing. A year ago, his brother Daniel was killed in an apparently random mugging. The case was never solved, and his attempts to find his brother’s killer were sidetracked when a kilo of cocaine was found in the trunk of his car. No one really believed the drugs were his, but he was reassigned to solo duty with the maritime unit.
Max
The sidekick in question is Max Mitchell (Vanessa Morgan), a modernized version of Leslie Charteris‘ crime-fighting gentleman thief Simon Templar (aka The Saint). Max was born on 5 December 1993; lives at several different addresses; and has nine driver’s licenses. After Max is arrested for trying to rob a safe deposit box, Cole takes her to the station for booking. (The cops who arrested Max called Cole away from his maritime duties to perform what they considered a menial task. The other cops might have just been poking fun at Cole, but Max was unusually friendly with her arresting officers, so she might have conned them into sending for Cole specifically.
While being booked, Max overhears Chief Li (Terry Chen) discussing a series of unsolved robberies. Max, who knows a lot about robberies, talks her way into helping the cops with that investigation. The Chief wants the case solved quickly, because the Mayor is up for reelection and the robbers are targeting major donors to his campaign.
(Karin Konoval) as Police Commissioner Russo — Konoval will be Mom in Andrew Stanton‘s upcoming sci-fi drama IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE.
Max’s father, George Graham (Jason Priestley) is serving time in a nearby prison, and Max visits him regularly. At the end of the first episode, George questions the wisdom of Max working with a cop. “Don’t worry,” she says reassuringly. “This is going to get us everything we want.”
Priestly told Michael Starr of the New York Post: “…about 25 years ago, there was a group of us who got conned by this guy; we got in this real estate investment with him and then he took off with a bunch of the money, so I spent a lot of time writing down all the qualities that he had that made him a good con man — and then I built the character around him.”
In episode two, this exchange happens:
MAX: “Chief Li called us in.”
COLE: “Damn it. Okay, I’ll meet you down there.”
MAX: “Absolutely not. This is our first official shift together. Okay? We need to project a united front. You think Hall and Oates walk on stage separately?”
Hall & Oates have had a rather public falling out, and it seems likely that Max would be aware of that. (Cole might not be.) This could be an homage to Jason Priestley’s previous detective show, PRIVATE EYES, the theme song of which was song of the same name by Hall & Oates.
Behind the flustered bank manager (Ken Godmere) in the first episode is a memorial to his late cat Chauncey
Sidekicks mostly don’t have sidekicks, but Max works with a “butler” named Ricky (Fletcher Donovan). Where she acquired him is unknown.
Because her parents were con artists and always on the move, Max spent her youth travelling the world. Her mother died in a car crash about ten years ago. “My parents loved me,” she tells Cole, when he suggests her childhood might have been less than desirable. “They gave me everything I needed. They taught me to never punch down, never work a mark that wasn’t deserved, and to always lend out my hand to anyone within reach.”
Cole’s late brother was a social worker, and lived on a boat with a cat named Marc. After Daniel was murdered, Cole moved onto the boat with the cat. This caused Cole’s fiancé Rachel Cisco (Veronica Long) to accept a job as a federal agent and move away. It is possible she took the job in hopes of persuading Cole to leave with her and stop investigating his brother’s death. From that, and the apparent indifference of the police toward just who planted the cocaine in Cole’s car, one could infer that powerful people want to keep what happened to Cole’s brother a secret.
Cole’s cat Marc likes to watch Discovery Channel documentaries, and is played by Jonsey, a five year old Devon Rex who might have been named after the ship’s cat on the Nostromo.
We learn more about Daniel when Cole explains his love for surfing. “My brother was ten years younger than me,” he tells Max. “I had to watch him a lot. One day we were watching this cheesy surfer movie on TV, and as soon as he saw it he knew he had to surf. My dad couldn’t really swim, and he was too little to go in the water by himself, so I took him. We ended up learning how to surf together. Kind of became my thing.”
Cole’s former partner Detective Simmons (Michael Xavier) thinks Cole is “not a team player” but still looks out for him. Simmons is now paired with Detective Yates (Amy Goodmurphy) who is easily the funniest character on the show.
Nicole Muñoz as Summer Lake in “Show Me The Murder” (Episode Two)
WILD CARDS is filmed in and near Vancouver, British Columbia, and it seems to be set there, though the name of the city has not been uttered in the first seven episodes, and license plates are noticeably generic. But a Burrard Street address is mentioned, and in the third episode, some of the story happens at Karl’s Meats which is actually located in nearby Abbotsford.
Each episode presents a separate mystery, and the episode titles refer to books, films or television shows that are clues to the mystery’s solution. The first episode is “The Infinity Thief” and pairs well with the Wendy Xu novel “The Infinity Particle“. That book’s main characters, Clem and Kye, are a lot like Max and Cole.