By Curt Schleier

I liked Grace Hanadarko (Holly Hunter) a lot more before I got to know her so well.  Perhaps familiarity really does breed contempt.  It’s just that I’m now really worried about the possibilities of actually SAVING GRACE (TNT, Mondays at 10 p.m.).

In “Yeehaw, Geepaw,” the body of a Native American veteran just returned from Iraq is found burned and buried in a shallow grave.  Along side his body is an owl feather, which will keep his soul from doing whatever good souls are supposed to do.  Uncertain of the symbolism, she finds Grace consults her grandfather, a Choctaw, or at least tries to

They had a wonderful relationship, these two.  He taught her to ride when she was a child. He calls her Champaili, which means Sweet One.  And now she’s shocked to discover he has Alzheimer’s.  It is, of course, something Grace would have known had she returned one of her sister’s persistent phone calls.  Sis wants to put grandpa into a facility where they don’t have to worry about him; Grace says no and elects to spend time with him.

In and of itself this is one of the best episodes of the series so far.  It’s well written and artfully directed, and shows a lot of different sides of Grace, including a capacity for familial love she hadn’t demonstrated before.  Of course, Grace solves the case.  After all, she is a good detective.  But I don’t think fans -- and I count myself in that number – follow the show in a kind of intellectual vacuum one episode at a time.  We know her cumulatively, the way we do a friend.  And things are starting not to compute for me.


In the beginning, Grace was an object of sympathy.  She’d lost a sister in the Oklahoma City bombing and she blames herself.   Because Grace wasn’t available to baby sit, her sister had to go to the Federal Building the next day – the wrong day – to pick up a Social Security card for her new born son.  It’s a tremendous burden, and it’s easy to understand why Earl, the tobacco-chewing, last-chance angel assigned to lead Grace to redemption refuses to give up.

But in one recent episode we learn that a favorite aunt had an affair with Grace’s father, a firefighter who died in the aftermath of the bombing.  And there were other incidents.  There’s so much wrong in her life that she’s on the verge of turning sympathy into pity.


And of course all that sleeping around doesn’t help her image.  She’s having an affair with a married partner.  And it seems she’ll sleep with anyone at the drop of a cat.  By the way, that’s not a misprint.  A co-worker was feeling depressed because he had to euthanize his pet cat, so she gave him a sympathy fuck to cheer him up.  At what point does a promiscuous woman become a slut?

Finally, I ask the same question about her drinking.  Is there a dividing line between a social drinker and an alcoholic?  If so, I think she crossed it.

So guys, let’s find more positive redeeming features for Grace.  I like her too much to hate her.