Not exactly PB,
but still welcome
Editor, The Commercial,
Does our fair city have a publicist in Hollywood?
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
A few months ago, I was watching an episode of the CW’s “Wild Cards” — a series about a disgraced cop paired with a female con artist to seek redemption for both — when she began to list some of the towns where she had lived in her youth: Seattle, Vegas and Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
I did a double-take. Since I had closed-captioning enabled, I read the words there to assure my ears had not deceived me. Yep, it said Pine Bluff. It was just a passing reference, yet there it was, on national TV.
That seemed like an anomaly, until Sunday night when CBS decided it was time to stop showing reruns of reruns. The first entry in its new fall season was the returning series “Tracker,” about a guy who travels the country collecting rewards for locating missing people. (It’s one of those “Don’t try to figure out the logic, cause there isn’t any” light dramas with a little action thrown in.)
The opening shot of the star’s search area this episode was printed plainly on-screen: Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
Wow! Not merely a reference this time, but a whole episode set in Our Town… only it wasn’t. I know Jefferson County from Ferda to Pinebergen, and the show’s establishing shot of rolling hills will not be found in it; Lincoln County, maybe, but not Jefferson.
OK, ignore that and concentrate on urban shots. It didn’t get any better: The few shops shown are not to be found around Pine Bluff or even White Hall. There was a brief overhead shot of an industrial area that might possibly have been the Port of Pine Bluff, but I doubt it.
Ignoring the background imagery, the episode continued in its formulaic manner. The series, I have noted, seldom shows more than three or four people in a scene; a “crowd shot” is six. I guess it saves on paying extras.
Overall, the episode was fulfilling for viewers craving anything that wasn’t another rerun, or sports. It was only after it wrapped that I realized the cast for the episode was almost entirely monochromatic. Nope, not Pine Bluff at all!
Still, it was nice to see a show about “Pine Bluff” that did not focus on the negative but just showed it to be a typical American city.
D.H. Ridgway,
Pine Bluff