[Si] TV

When CBS announced the fall season debut of Cane, its new show about a wealthy Cuban-American family and their rum and sugar cane empire, Latinos rejoiced for several reasons. The nighttime soap would star the always magnetic Jimmy Smits, along with icons Rita Moreno and Hector Elizondo; it was created by Cynthia Cidre, the Cuban-American writer who also penned the screenplay for The Mambo Kings; and it would mark the first dramatic series centered around a Latino family on a major network primetime slot (NBC's Kingpin (2003) was a mini-series). Almost immediately, the blogs and bodega conversations pondered a question: Will Cane be the one?

Maybe the question we should be asking is: Why do we need a TV program to be the "one?" Granted, despite being the largest minority group in the U.S., Latinos remain one of the most underrepresented groups on the air. And after 75-plus years of television, the American viewing public's idea of Latinos ranges from the desert-wandering bandit and raven-haired spitfire (1930s-1960s) to the urban-wandering criminal and raven-haired mami (1970s-present), with requisite maids, gardeners, and busboys as non-speaking background fillers. But as with the impossible task of reducing the Latino identity to a succinct, precise definition, anointing a television series as some sort of savior, come to bring la raza to its rightful place in the American lexicon, is not only idealistic, but also naïve.                                

For one, and perhaps most importantly, the television industry, like any other media business, exists under the economic auspices of advertising and/or sponsorship. Any seemingly altruistic or socially aware commentary that finds its way into a dramatic series may be the writer/producer's closet-activist politics showing, but make no mistake about it: the viewing audience cares about a good story, well told, first and foremost. If they don't buy it, well, neither will Madison Ave.

Secondly, the Latino experience, which encompasses 500 years' worth of interaction among most of the countries in the Western Hemisphere, would present too large a canvas on which to paint a television show. Too many stories to tell, too many stereotypes to dispel.

At best, we can hope that Cane's writers, including Smits, who's credited as a co-executive producer, don't take the easy route, in storytelling or in character development.

To that end, Cane delivers. The pilot episode was a little speech-heavy with talks of "honor," "duty," and "family," which are becoming benign stereotypical Latino traits in themselves. Then you witness Elizondo and Moreno trade lines and come away feeling like even though it was Pancho's (Elizondo) early efforts that made the Duques wealthy, it has been Amalia's (Moreno) toughness as a wife and mother in a not-so-Latino friendly America that has kept this operation-as a family and as a business-in the black.

Where Cane falters, however, is in its voice, as it tends to hover in the grey area between soap and drama, with a little MTV-era cross promotion thrown in (e.g. Daddy Yankee cameos as himself in episode two, which is no surprise because Interscope Records honcho Jimmy Iovine is one of the show's executive producers). Comparisons to The Sopranos might be unfair, but with David Chase's Emmy winner having become the yardstick by which "edgy" drama is measured, no dramatic series will duck that bullet.

In the pilot, the newly anointed Duque Rum CEO Alex (Smits) commits a murder with an apparent "do what'cha gotta do" attitude, but by episode two, he's second-guessing himself almost to the point of panic. And when he seeks counsel from his adopted father, Pancho (we forget to mention that Alex married his adopted sister, Isabel), it almost comes off as the producers felt they needed to get their money's worth out of Elizondo by giving him more lines.

Is Cane "the one?" Well, that would depend on what that "one" means to you. If you're looking for the definitive Latino family epic, encapsulating all that it means to be Hispanic in the good ol' US of A, you'll be disappointed. If you've been waiting for an entertaining primetime soap about a wealthy American family who just happens to be Cuban, featuring solid acting by great actors and halfway decent writing that will hopefully get better, then by all means, rejoice: Cane is exactly what you've been looking for.