Ah, the will-they-won’t-they trope. It’s a timeless feature of long-running stories, adding that human interest hook to procedural stories that don’t necessarily call for romance, but are made all the stronger for it. Doing the right thing is a noble motivation, but acting based on feeling — particularly how one feels for someone else? This is the hook that keeps many viewers coming back to The CW’s Wild Cards. Like ABC’s long-running police drama Castle before it, Wild Cards benefits from an unconventional pairing in Cole Ellis (Giacomo Gianniotti) and Max Mitchell (Vanessa Morgan), the former a detective, and the latter an out-of-the-box consultant whose unique approach to investigation puts a fresh spin on police procedure, and forces the rest of the department to think outside the box too. And the sizzling chemistry between the two certainly doesn’t hurt things either.
What Is ‘Wild Cards’ About?
Wild Cards follows Detective Cole Ellis as he is partnered with Max Mitchell, a con artist who agrees to work with the police, initially, to get out of a criminal charge, and then eventually to work off time on her father, George’s (Jason Priestly) sentence. While the pair works their way up to a begrudging trust by the end of Season 1, the revelation that Max is just using him to help her father with a $33 million score puts a snag in Ellis’s trust in her. Due perhaps to her charm, and also to the fact that she does genuinely mean well when it comes to catching murderers, the two patch things up and take their flirty banter to new heights in Season 2.
Though the second season has the throughline of Ellis still investigating his younger brother’s death, now with Max’s help, and Max working covertly with her father on another potential score, this one even bigger than the last, it still retains the case-of-the-week format that is so essential to procedurals, and in the case of this show specifically, creates more opportunities for Max and Ellis to get themselves into increasingly over-the-top situations. With the series already renewed for an additional two seasons, we can only imagine what scenarios these two will get up to next.
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What Makes Max and Ellis’s Dynamic in ‘Wild Cards’ Work?
When it comes to Max and Ellis’s dynamic, and what makes this “opposites attract” trope work so well, it really comes down to chemistry and writing. Yes, those things can and should be a given, but that can be a tough balance for a series that leans too hard into one without considering the other. Too much banter, not enough chemistry, and it becomes too quippy. Too much chemistry without the writing to back it up, and it gets uninteresting.
With Wild Cards, the different situations the leads find themselves in each week help refresh the situation while giving their relationship space to grow. Max’s seamless ability to adopt any personality and essentially go undercover at a moment’s notice might have grated on Ellis at first, but it’s something he comes to really respect about her, and is a tool he actually comes to rely on. For Max’s part, though she does get a thrill out of pulling a con, even if said con is just a disguise that tricks people short term, she does enjoy getting a chance to help catch murderers, continuing to help the police even after her father’s sentence is served.
But this isn’t just about how well Ellis and Max work together despite ostensibly having nothing in common. Because without Gianniotti and Morgan’s chemistry, this whole thing would be a moot point. As they go through these situations that at times feel pulled right out of romance novels — cowboy romance, sports romance, even billionaire romance if you squint — there’s a simmering longing and desire throughout their interactions. The two are unambiguously interested in each other, but their work obligations and those pesky lingering trust issues keep getting in the way. This is actually what makes the slow burn of it all work so well. My biggest frustration with a slow burn in general is that if the couple are mutually interested, I don’t understand what’s stopping them from getting together except the vaguest sense of “we can’t.” But Wild Cards has done the work to establish why, exactly, these two can’t. They revisit the question often and conclude that the timing is never right, which makes the few romantic moments we do get with them just that much angstier.
Unlike the end of Season 1, Season 2 ends with the two separated, but in a much better place in terms of their relationship. With both of their arcs for the season having reached a conclusion, it’ll be interesting to see where their relationship goes in the future. There’s no longer any reason for Max to work with the department once Ellis is reinstated following the internal investigation that forced him on a temporary leave. But Castle found a way to keep Nathan Fillion‘s titular character around and working with Stana Katic‘s Detective Beckett, so I’m confident Wild Cards will manage to do the same, especially given that, at least in my opinion, the show leans so much more into the romance than Castle did. But with nothing standing in their way any longer — except, perhaps, the surprise arrival of Max’s mother — will this opposites attract duo finally take the plunge into relationship territory? Here’s hoping!
