If you’re not familiar with Greg Rucka’s comic “Stumptown,” you’ve probably seen commercials for the new ABC crime drama and thought, “Ugh, what is television doing to Portland now?”
If you are familiar with the comic, you’ve probably seen ads for the show and thought, “I hope they don’t screw it up.”
Well, good news. The show, which stars Cobie Smulders (“How I Met Your Mother,” “The Avengers”) as Rucka’s classically do-the-right-thing but make-the-wrong-life-choices private eye Dex Parrios, is true to both the city and its source material. Dex (full name: Dexedrine) is still a hard-drinking, risk-addicted military veteran with PTSD, raising a Timbers-loving brother with Down syndrome while solving crimes and pissing off the cops. It’s a network show but still has edge, as well as a high-watt cast that’s more diverse than Portland, including Jake Johnson, Michael Ealy and Camryn Manheim, plus Canadian First Nations legend Tantoo Cardinal as the matriarch of the tribal Whispering Winds casino.
There’s also Adrian Martinez as a taco truck owner with mysterious underworld ties, one of several obligatory Portland-being-Portland touches. The first episode, which airs Sept. 25 on ABC, begins with two goons in the front seat of a car, engaging in a Tarantinoesque discussion of coffee tasting notes. Ansel spends nearly the whole episode in Timbers gear, albeit the stuff you get from the official MLS store, not the Timbers Army. Both of those things are also call-backs to the comic. The locally shot pilot features the Southeast 28th Avenue food cart pod near Burnside, the Nite Hawk restaurant on Interstate and, rather dramatically, the Broadway Bridge.
Unfortunately, shooting has since moved to Vancouver (British Columbia, that is, where production costs are cheaper), but at last week’s Rose City Comic Con, Rucka and “Stumptown” showrunner Jason Richman suggested that it might return (assuming the show’s a hit). A fifth series of “Stumptown” the comic, likely incorporating some of the characters and changes from the show, is also in the works.
Street Roots spoke to Rucka at Rose City Comic Con, where he was not only promoting the TV show but also working full-time at his day job: signing and personally ringing up sales of his books and comics, which in addition to “Stumptown” include “Lazarus,” “Queen and Country,” “Black Magick,” the DC Comics’ relaunch of “Batman” and “Wonder Woman.”
Jason Cohen: How long of a process was it for this show to happen?
Greg Rucka: It is almost always this ridiculously long and difficult process. “Stumptown” took less than a year. Go figure. I’ve got one thing that’s been in development for 15 years. Things in Hollywood happen really, really slowly, until they happen very, very quickly. I think they came back to seriously acquire it in the fall of 2018, and they got the order to shoot a pilot in January 2019. And here we are.
Cohen: When you wrote the comic, did you ever imagine that it would be ...
Rucka: No. You never do it. There are people who create comics with the sole intent of getting them optioned and turning them into movies. That’s not how I write a comic. That’s never been the goal.
Cohen: I was wondering more if you imagined it being somewhere like HBO or AMC, rather than a broadcast network.
Rucka: No. Literally no expectation whatsoever. Because the root question is, “Did you imagine they would make a TV series out of it?” And the answer is, no. It was a comic. It still is a comic. But I think ABC’s a perfect fit. It’s a PI show, man! And I’ve said this multiple times: It’s a great big soppy love letter to “The Rockford Files.”
Cohen: How close did the show come to not being called “Stumptown?”
Rucka: Really close. They fought that name like you wouldn’t believe. Apparently, there was an executive who thought that title meant it was about war veterans.
Cohen: (Puzzled silence.)
Rucka: Yeah, it takes a moment to get there. Like, really? You heard “Stumptown” and you thought of amputees? They tried like, a half-dozen, a dozen different titles, and didn’t find anything that stuck. And the media had been calling it “Stumptown” anyway.
Cohen: Were you involved in picking Cobie Smulders?
Rucka: Oh, I had nothing to do with the casting at all. When they came to Portland to shoot, I got to talk with her, and it was like, OK, this is a no-brainer. I think she’s perfect. She’s a phenomenal performer, and you can see it in the pilot. There are a lot of emotions that run through that – some real subtle things she does that just kind of blew me away. I couldn’t be happier with that casting.
Cohen: And it’s still Dex. They didn’t soften the character.
Rucka: No, not at all. And in point of fact, my understanding is she read all the source material and was like, “This is the character I want to play.”
Cohen: One of the fans here at Rose City Comic Con said he was worried the TV version would brush over Dex’s bisexuality, since that isn’t in the pilot.
Rucka: That was one of Cobie’s requirements. She’s not playing hetero-normative. It was one of the things that drew her to the character. You can actually see it’s there in the pilot – it’s very subtle. Once the show has legs, they’ll do whatever they want. Dex will sleep with just about anyone with a pulse!
Cohen: One change in the show happened for an obvious reason – in the comic Dex tangles with a mobster who is part of MS-13.
Rucka: Yeah. That was a decade ago. Nobody knew who they were, and I could do something different. Now, under Hissyfitler, you can’t use MS-13 at all. Because “they’re as evil as al-Qaeda!” They’re really not. But you’ve gotta be responsible. It’s a dog whistle.
Cohen: You stopped tweeting over a year ago. Is our current White House resident the reason?
Rucka: It’s an aggregate reason. I left almost all social media. I don’t think you can make a single convincing argument for a good that social media does. Any good that you can argue that social media has accomplished, I can come up with five things it has eroded. The dumbing down of the nation, the destruction of the social contract, the destruction of democratic norms, the destruction of civility, the destruction of faith in science and reason, the destruction of the ability of sensible people to agree to disagree, the end of compromise … all of it – all of it – is to be laid at the feet of Google and Twitter and Facebook. And I think the motherfuckers who are making bank on it know it, and I am tired of their lip service that they’re gonna fix it. It has been corrupted and absolutely weaponized. It is the equivalent of the NRA. It’s a terrorist organization. And you can’t participate in it. You are culpable. You are culpable, because you are the product. It doesn’t matter what your reasoning is. It doesn’t matter how you use it. You’re still part of the vector. It is designed to bypass all of your reason, and it doesn’t matter if you know it. The only way to combat it is not to play.
Cohen: I think if I’d been a newcomer to Portland when I first read “Stumptown,” I would have thought, “This is a slightly exaggerated noir version of the city.” But these days, I’m not sure it’s exaggerated.
Rucka: Fiction is taking these normal things and then turning them up a little bit. But every time I think, “Ah, we’ve been having a little fun, we’re going a little further (than reality),” something happens and you’re like, no, turns out we’re actually pretty much spot-on.
Cohen: One of the comic’s stories involved the Portland Timbers, scalpers and fan violence. Today you’d probably be addressing the Major League Soccer ban of the anti-fascist Iron Front symbol, and the Timbers Army protest of that policy.
Rucka: Yeah. You know that the league is terrified of having, quote unquote, European-style violence. Should something like what’s in that third arc of “Stumptown” happen, there would be huge political pressure.
Cohen: I assume you are all-in with what the Army has been doing – periods of silence, a concessions boycott.
Rucka: Absolutely. I think it’s important. And I also appreciate the way that they’ve been reaching out to the community and saying, “Look, this is what we’re doing; this is why we’re doing it. You don’t have to, but this is our stance.” My bigger issue is the front office. They need to back (the Timbers Army). And they need to back them visibly. They’re going to have to fix it.
Cohen: The comic predates “Portlandia,” but does it feel like a corrective to that show in some ways?
Rucka: Yeah. But I’m not a fan of “Portlandia,” and I never was. I feel that “Portlandia” was mean-spirited. It was rarely specific to Portland. And I kind of feel like it was exploitative. It took me a while to come around to that, because everybody in Portland was so delighted to have a show about us. We were willing to say, “Yeah, keep kicking us!”
But I don’t think it was a kind show. There were some bits where I was like, that is absolutely this town, like when they go to the restaurant and they bring, like, the resume for your meal. But a lot of it, I was like, that’s anywhere. That’s Brooklyn, that’s Chicago, that’s San Francisco.
Cohen: “Stumptown” is a bit more about a city with skeletons in the closet. There’s crime. Violence. Greed.
Rucka: I love Portland, and being able to love a place is also being able to look at it and go, “This is screwed up.”
You’re writing for Street Roots. We’ve got a huge, huge homeless problem right now. And that’s not entirely on the city. This goes back to the Reagan administration, right? But we should be doing more. We can do more.
We have a consistent problem with our law enforcement in this city. Right? We need to address it.
We are one of the most liberal cities in the country, and there’s still a remarkable underlying racism at work, that goes all the way back to the founding of the goddamn state.
When I came up here the very first time – and I mean the very first time, 1993 – my wife and I had to fly up from California because we knew we were moving to Eugene and we were buying a car, so we wanted to buy in Oregon. We went to the Saturn dealership in Beaverton. We flew into PDX and were picked up by somebody from the dealership, and they drove us out to Beaverton.
It was this beautiful sunny day, and on the way out, on one of the overpasses, there was a fucking swastika hanging! And I’m a Jewish middle-class kid from Central California. I am familiar with anti-Semitism. I am not familiar with seeing somebody flying a goddamn Nazi flag. That’s part of the state’s DNA as well.
FURTHER READING: In mono-racial Portland, ‘white supremacists can hide in plain sight’
This all has to be addressed. But it’s not as if Portland ignores it. We are trying. A lot of us have compassion fatigue. Is there a concerted forward motion? No. There’s forward motion like there is in a great many places. It’s random. It’s in fits and starts. But in the main, I don’t feel that Portland ignores these things. I don’t believe that Portland pretends they’re not there. I think Portland has the harder problem. How do we fix it? And then we have to argue about how to fix it. But you can’t do that if you don’t acknowledge it. This is one of the whitest cities in the country. And yet it is a city that I think aspires to a greater diversity.