I’m Married to the Lead Detective on This Show
He’s about to stop a serial killer from brutally murdering every woman in our town. I’m about to call him 10–15 more times and ask him to stop working and come home.
I was raised to believe a woman’s place is in the kitchen, calling her husband who is a lead detective on the biggest case of his small town career and telling him to stop working and come home. I’ve got something important to say and that’s: damn it, Marty, when are you coming back to this family?
Do I realize there is a savage murderer on the loose brutalizing women in our community? Yes. Do I care? No. I am focused on making an elaborate dinner for my husband, the way a woman should: starch, protein, veg. I can’t just leave it in the oven. There’s a salad on that plate. And yes — it’s dressed.
The time to call your detective husband and ask him to come home is both before and after cooking the meal. I don’t have a plan B. Whether or not he plans to be home on time, I’m going to sit alone at the table while our salads wilt and drink. This is the role I was born to play.
He’s going to keep working. I’m going to keep calling. His job is to save these women so they can live the lives they were meant to lead, calling their own husbands and telling them to come home from their work. My job is to interrupt that process as much as possible. Time is a flat circle. Also, I’m a foil.
I don’t have a lot going for me, aside from the shapeliness of my bum which you probably noticed my husband gazing at longingly in the opening sequence. It’s challenging to make time for love when you’re a leading detective solving some freaky ass murders in Louisiana. And I’m an idea more than I am a person. He wants to solve these murders so bad, he will forgo banging his hot wife. Also, he’s cheating on me.
Apart from a light flashing across the screen of my internal monologue that says call your husband, my mind is an empty slate. In a different era, I’d be diagnosed with nerves and locked in an insane asylum. Instead I’m here, calling my cop husband and interrupting right when he’s about to make a huge break in the case that has devastated our little community.
It’s not much, but it’s an honest living. My husband’s busy coercing confessions out of meth heads by throwing them against walls and withholding their Miranda rights. I’m busy making dinner, and calls. The bad guy, you can tell which one because his wife-beater tank top is extra dingy and the yard where he operates his sex-cult has some extra rusted pickup trucks in it–he’s busy doing bad things. Plot twist! He’s also a pedophile. So it’s okay if my husband kills him in an extra-judicial operation and later covers it up. Whoopsy!
In our world, the heroes are flawed: they buy drugs from hookers and they skip family dinner, but gosh darn if they aren’t hot. That’s the kind of clarity you don’t get in real life, where ugliness and evil have no proven association.
Sometimes, I wish I were written for cable. Then, after my husband had made his arrest or tied up the loose ends of the justified-murder-coverup, I know he’d come home and we’d be a family again. At least, until the next sex-cult-murderer arrives on the scene.
But baby, this is prestige TV, where there are no rules. Except that male detectives and soldiers all must have a wife calling them and telling them to come home.
So, my love, I’ll say it ten to fifteen more times, forever and ever, unless we don’t get picked up for season two: this family needs you. Please come home.
Kara Panzer is a writer based in New York. She writes about things like her obsession with her dog, marathon non-training plans, and the time a stranger threw up on her jacket at her favorite bar. Read more at karapanzer.com.
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