If you're in the City of Angels and you walk down any street, chances are you're near the site of a previous crime scene.
If you're walking with crime author James Ellroy, he could certainly tell you the specifics of those crime scenes in gruesome detail. This is the premise of Ellroy's new weekly show.
But James Ellroy's L.A.: City of Demons should be called City of My Demons because the city has shaped Ellroy in every way imaginable. The first episode of his new ID Network show makes that clear in abundant fashion.
If you're an Ellroy fan/follower you certainly know about his obsession with the Black Dahlia case which formed one of the novels of his L.A. crime quadrilogy. And since the 1st episode of this series is called Dead Women Own Me you sorta know what you're gonna get.
The horrifying, beyond-brutal death of Elizabeth Short, a beautiful L.A. party girl in 1947 captured young Ellroy's mind when he was given a book by his father written by Jack Web of early T.V.'s Dragnet fame. Ellroy says that he linked Short with the murder of his own mother, Jean Hilliker,
who was found strangled and possible sexually assaulted when Ellroy was 10-yrs-old. Several of Ellroy's recent books mention this linkage in one form or another including his latest, The Hilliker Curse.
Always painfully honest and with this seemingly obsessive need for self-confession, possibly to exorcise the demons who are his constant companion, Ellroy talks endlessly about his love and lust for his lost mother and the unhealthy link to Elizabeth Short. So two of the three cases in the 1st episode have some nearly direct connection to Ellroy's life and interior world.
But it's the third case discussed on the episode, the case of 16-yr-old Stephanie Gorman, a promising young actress, who was raped and murdered in 1965 that brings the idea of Ellroy linking crimes that take place here in L.A. with his own world into sharp focus.
Ellroy sees a clear parallel with this young girl's murder and the 2009 murder of Lily Burke, the 17-year-old daughter of two of Ellroy's friends. Whether for the show's purposes, purposes of a literary nature, or as a true (if bizarre) linkage in his mind, you begin to see that murder in Los Angeles, especially murder of the sexual kind, holds a deep and abiding meaning for Ellroy. It's almost as if he believes that there is a true demonic presence in the city that transcends time and to which he is intimately connected, perhaps even feeding from, for his prose.
Three stories, three personal tales in this first episode. Compelling? Certainly at times, especially if you were being exposed to Ellroy for the first time. His affected delivery of the prose narrative he certainly must have written for the show, the intense but flat nature of his dead-eyed delivery, and the stories and details of those stories are certain to evoke some sort of visceral response. But if you had prior knowledge of any of the cases that Ellroy discussed, the first episode was perhaps a bit of a disappointment because it covered no really new ground.
Ellroy is Ellroy is Ellroy. Whether listening to him at a talk (link), reading his prose or watching him on television, you're gonna get Ellroy. He's not an 
actor; he has no pretense or artiface. You like him or you don't. I don't know what I expected but I didn't expect the show's 1st ep to be so close to him. Understanding a little of who Ellroy is, I should not have expected anything different. His ex-wife and a bizarre, animated dog of his named Barko (which is now deceased) take up some of the screen time. Personal indeed.
I'm not saying any this is good or bad - just that it is Ellroy with all his warts and pimples. Are people ready to have this man and his amazing crime vocabulary derived of years of obsessive study delivered into their living rooms? We will certainly find out as the series unfolds.
I'm curious to see what the 2nd episode will involve. How many crimes will Ellroy be able to link to himself? Or will that even be part of the show going forward? I hope they break that linkage and just deliver some of this material straight up with only a bit of an Ellroy chaser. I'm not sure the show benefits from that much of the intensely personal, confessional-style narrative - and the dog he can lose anytime without, I suspect, anyone missing it much.
From a Discovery statement by Ellroy: "Crime is a palpitatingly perennial gas - and L.A. crime is the craaaazy creme-de-la-crime," Ellroy states. "Viewers
are terribly tired of the trailer trash tragedies that caustically contaminate documentary TV. They wantonly want to groove, grok, gravitate and glide toward glamorous crime - and L.A. is where all that shimmering sh...stuff...pervertedly percolates. This show will be serious, satirical and great fun."
So far, that's pretty much right.
JAMES ELLROY'S LA: CITY OF DEMONS is on Wednesdays at 10 PM (ET) on Investigation Discovery.
