I wish Prodigal Son had concentrated more on some of the things established in the pilot episode. By which I mean, I wish they had brought up police brutality as a real issue before current events made it impossible to avoid.

The show started with a police officer shooting an unarmed man right after Malcolm had convinced the guy to put down his weapon. Throughout the show, Malcolm continues to do this - tries to talk people into surrendering nonviolently - and every time a cop is also there he begs them not to shoot.

It could have been so easy for the show to explicitly make that man's murder the catalyst of Malcolm's declining mental health.

He was a good enough FBI agent to be the lead agent on that serial killer case, after he had been with them for 10 years: he was not nearly as reckless/impulsive as he is now. Seeing a man murdered in front of him, hearing the cop brag about killing the guy (and losing his job as punishment for punching the murderer) is what made him spiral. Knowing a person who he was trying to help - trying to save - was killed anyway is what most of his trauma is about, so that's just another thing to have PTSD over.... The events of the show after that are just making it worse and worse.

Also in the pilot, Malcolm had a nightmare at the police station, and he tried to run away from it. He was terrified, he accidentally knocked down Dani, but he never tried to hurt anyone. And the officers all drew their weapons and pointed their guns at him... And season 2 decided to reference this by once more giving him a nightmare at the police station and once more having officers ready to shoot him, even though he was once again not trying to hurt anyone. Dani makes a joke about his nightmares being intense, because the audience is supposed to find this whole thing funny I guess? It's framed as a comedic scene, a breath of fresh air after the heavy emotions of his nightmare. And it would be, if the officers in the background didn't have their hands hovering over their guns, ready to draw their weapons and shoot if Bright moves wrong even though he's just sitting behind his desk.

The way the show treated that vs JT is weird. Are we criticizing police brutality - which includes how the police treat people who are mentally ill (and other marginalized groups) - or are we not?

Because the show had a police brutality plotline in the pilot episode, if they had bothered to actually do anything with what they established there. It had the potential for commentary on how law enforcement protects their corrupt officers and fires the ones who speak out against them, and how police discriminated against the mentally ill. That isn't to say we should ignore race when it comes to police discrimination! And adding in a plotline that addresses that is important as well, if you're trying to address police brutality as a whole! Because racism is definitely a huge problem! But it is not the only problem, and adding in that plotline while also making a joke out of the discrimination your mentally ill character faces when his emotional outbursts are met with officers ready to draw their weapons and shoot him (when he's never been violent towards them and they have no reason to believe he would hurt someone there)? Yikes.

It just doesn't feel like the writers really care about these issues. It feels like they're only doing this so their show looks good compared to other cop drama shows.