TV Review of Lights Out: Does Hollywood Love Boxing More than the Rest of America?

TV Review of Lights Out: Does Hollywood Love Boxing More than the Rest of America?

In the fourth episode of FX’s terrific new show Lights Out (about a retired heavy weight champion trying to survive economically despite deep debt and IRS scrutiny) the lead character, Patrick “Lights” Leary, and his father are at a bar on a Friday night trying to get the waitress to turn one of the many TVs to boxing. “Can you turn it to the fight?” they ask. The waitress notices all the TVs are on Mixed Martial Arts fighting and replies “It’s on the fight.”

One of the subplots of Lights Out is how the revenue from boxing is drying up due to MMA style fights, and how boxing’s best days may be behind it. All over the country Mixed Martial Arts or variations of it have picked up popularity and cultural buzz and threaten to eclipse boxing as the dominant form in which two men rearrange each other’s faces. But you wouldn’t know it by the way Hollywood remains loyal to boxing, only cheating on it with the young MMA in independent films (like Red Belt) while every year sees at least one big ticket movie about boxing. Cinderella Man, Ali, Rocky 60 and Loving It, and last year’s sensation The Fighter all show that boxing is alive and well. The flat truth is that despite its slower pace, boxing is just more dramatic than Mixed Martial Arts is.

Lights Out is much like boxing itself: graceful, slow boiling, but able to sneak up on you with moments of shocking action. MMA is faster, less strategic, more violent, and just flat out cruder—as Lights himself discovered in a brutal cage match at the end of that same episode—but with much less soul. Lights Out has a great lead performance from Holt McCallany as a good guy getting sucked into a bad situation (a hustler brother, a cocky rival boxer, and a scarily quiet mobster all want a piece of him). He carries his head down and eyes focused as if he never left the ring. When he finally snaps and releases the resting anger beneath the surface you realize he’ll always be a boxer. And the audience wouldn’t have it any other way.

Scene Stealer to Watch: Lights Out has great roles for two veterans of HBO’s excellent The Wire (Pablo Schreiber as Light’s brother and Reg E. Cathy—like a more cynical, small screen Morgan Freeman—as a Don King-esque boxing promoter) who create energy for every scene they’re in, but I’m especially interested in Bill Irwin’s deceptively clean cut bookie Brennan. In a whisper of a performance, Brennan is a white washed mobster who isn’t as suburban as he lets on, he becomes more dangerous the stiller he gets.