The Girl that Went Away

There are two things we have to discuss when talking about a season (or, in this case, a half season) of White Collar: the general vibe of the season and how the overarching plotline is going. As I noted in my review of the first half of the first season of the show, White Collar desperately wanted its viewers to get engaged in the storyline of while Neal Caffrey’s girlfriend, Kate, bailed on him, leading to him escaping prison, which then led to him striking a deal with the FBI (specifically Agent Burke, the guy that caught him) to act as a consultant on white collar crimes. It’s all a really long and convoluted way to hook Caffrey and Burke together and get the show going… but it wanted to be something more.

The issue with that storyline, which the back half of this series only helps to illustrate, is that there’s no motivation to get invested in Neal and Kate. Neal is a great character, and there’s a reason this show was able to go for six strong seasons, and that’s all because Matt Bomer is charismatic as hell in the lead role of the convicted con-man-turned-FBI associate. Kate, though, is an empty character who never comes together as anything more than “this girl” and “a prize for Neal”. She’s not developed. She’s never fleshed out. She just remains Kate, the girl on the periphery that we never get to know.

This really limits the thrust of the major narrative for the series. Because Kate is already gone by the time the series starts up, with Neal chasing after her like she’s a ghost, we have no context for why Neal likes her or what she really means to him. Neal has to tell us, and while Bomer’s performance is great, that doesn’t work anywhere near as well as it would if the series could have shown us the two together for any length of time. Kate doesn’t come across as a real person because the show doesn’t have a way to invest in her.

Thus when (spoilers for a 14 year old season of television) Kate dies at the end of season one, you hardly care at all. Her death should have meaning for Neal, and for the show, but it doesn’t. If anything, getting rid of Kate helps the show feel like it can finally move forward. Every time Neal starts to make progress, starts to grow as a person, Kate is dangled in front of him so that he ends up veering towards her instead of becoming the better man he could become. The show uses her as a prop and once the prop is snatched away it finally gives the series a chance to evolve. You know, down the road in seasons we’ll get to…

Honestly if the show wanted to make Kate stick it needed to spend time before Neal was caught. There needed to be a season or two of the show that focused on Neal and Kate on the run together, doing crimes while the FBI closed in. Then we could get a feel for the two of them and actually understand her as a character. Of course, that would also introduce its own issues. For one, we’d view Neal as more of a bad guy in that context, which is something the show goes out of its way to mitigate. He’s a non-violent criminal that only steals from people and institutions that wouldn’t miss the money or valuables. Knowing that after the fact is one thing, but seeing it in the moment would color his character differently.

There’s also the fact that once we saw Neal get caught we’d then have to do a time jump and it’s hard for shows to make time jumps work. Then you have to explain what happened in the interim. You have to establish a lot of details that, by starting the show near the end of Neal’s prison term, it can skip past easily. It changes the dynamic of the series and forces the audience to accept a lot of steps that your standard police procedural doesn’t have to go through. White Collar would be a very different series if it tries to put in all that legwork to establish Kate as a character.

What this really illustrates, thinking it out, is that Kate shouldn’t have been in the show to begin with. Who knows what the original plan was. Maybe there was a thought that Kate could grow into a larger character and would become a regular on the show after this first season except that Kate’s actress, Alexandra Daddario, was an actress on the rise when she was cast on White Collar. The very next year (when this second half of a season aired) she also starred in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, which went on to be a solid performer at the Box Office and seemingly was the start of a franchise for her. Her schedule grew more full and she didn’t have time to be on a basic cable TV show anymore. So out goes Kate and, if anything else had been planned, that was scrapped for her character.

Still, there were ways they could have set this show up that didn’t require Kate to be a part of it. Maybe Neal has spent a shorter time in prison and escapes on his own, setting the plot in motion. Or perhaps instead of Kate going on the run (as she does in the show) due to threats to her (and Neal’s) life from a mysterious villain, instead Neal is the one threatened, and that puts the events of the show in motion. As it is, Kate doesn’t do much except leave, be a prize, and then (because she dies at the end of the season) ends up getting fridged to motivate the second season’s story. The series should have avoided this.

Kate, of course, wasn’t the only character introduced that didn’t end up continuing on with the series past this first season. Natalie Morales played FBI Special Agent Lauren Cruz, introduced after the pilot for the series and she stuck around until nearly the end of the season. She was a replacement for FBI Special Agent Diana Berrigan, played by Marsha Thomason, who was in the pilot, and then came back for the season finale before Cruz was quietly put on a bus and ignored after the first season. Diana took over the role and no one seemed to care that the team changed.

These are, honestly, growing pains plenty of shows go through. Characters cycle in and out, plotlines evolve, plans change. White Collar didn’t necessarily handle it as gracefully as it could have, but at the same time I do think they were expecting the Kate plotline to go differently. The show feels like it was building to something, and then it had to swerve hard and go a new direction for its future seasons (and, as we’ll see, the stitching the show has to do for its overarching storyline to make season work doesn’t always feel organic). Plans changed and the show had to work to keep up.

With that said, I think both of these cast changes were for the best. Daddario was not great as Kate. Whether she couldn’t get into the performance, or didn’t feel the character, or was simply still too green as an actress to really deliver in the role, her character was a dud. I wasn’t sad when she died, and the show was better without her on it. And while Lauren Cruz wasn’t a bad character, Morales was a bad fit with the rest of the cast. Her performance was too sarcastic to blend with the easy chemistry between Bomer and DeKay (as lead Agent Burke). Moving things around and adjusting characters really helped the series in the second season and beyond.

I think this first season shows the struggles the series was going through, but by the end of it the series also proved it was willing to retool and improve. After this the show found its stride and the later seasons really took off. This first season isn’t bad, but it does have room to grow and, thankfully, it does. It’s a pilot season for what the show would become.