Movie Box Review

CBS was so confident in its returning schedule this season that it barely ordered any back-up shows (and it wasn't far wrong).  Its sole midseason drama, the high-profile cop drama now known as NYC 22 (after previous flirtations with Rookies and The 2-2) will hit the network's schedule starting April 15 on Sundays at 10PM.

NYC 22 won't actually dislodge any existing CBS show, as CSI Miami will have exhausted its 19-episode order for the season by the time tthe new series debuts.  (It appears, at least for now, that CBS will keep The Good Wife on Sundays as NYC 22's lead-in.)  Created by big-time novelist and screenwriter Richard Price (Sea of Love, The Color of Money, Clockers, etc) and with Robert DeNiro as one of the executive producers, NYC 22 had a promising but not completely successful pilot (see our pilot report Here)--however, in the months since it was produced, there's been plenty of time to improve the show, so let's hope for the best.

Had it managed to become a full-fledged series, PARTNERS might have been a decent fit with ABC's other female-oriented crime shows like Castle and Body of Proof, but based on the pilot, its only points of distinctiveness were probably too gimmicky and contrived to work.  

The title characters Mattie (Scottie Thompson) and Jess (Annie Wersching) are, of course, partnered as police homicide detectives, but that's not all.  In Edward Bernero's script (he was longtime showrunner on Criminal Minds and co-created Third Watch), they're also--unbeknownst to all--half-sisters.  But wait, there's more.  Their mother is in prison for having murdered Mattie's father, which is also apparently unknown to the entire police force.  And as we find out at the end of the hour (I don't think there can really be a spoiler alert for a busted pilot), actually--unbeknownst even to Mattie-- Jess was the shooter, protecting her younger sister from the molestation she herself had suffered.  

That's an awful lot of baggage for an otherwise routine cop show.  And "routine" is the right word, because the pilot hardly puts the show's best foot forward plot-wise, relying on the oldest "twist" in the murder-mystery book:  if a married man's mistress is murdered and it turns out he didn't do it, who else would have had a motive to kill his lover?   Exactly.  Add the usual cliches of hero cops leaping into action without backup, doubting but ultimately supportive superior officers, and miraculously obtained warrants, and you have a show that's familiar for all the wrong reasons.

The only bright spots in the pilot are the two stars:  Thompson was the highlight of NBC's short-lived Trauma, and Wersching was a key part of 24's last 2 seasons until the sin of having sex with Jack Bauer led to her character's immediate death.  Even though the sisters are unoriginal (Jess is happily married and follows the rules; Maddie is rebellious and devoted to the single life), the actresses are good company.  Not good enough, though, to make Partners worthwhile.

Partners, which was produced in-house by ABC Studios, could actually have had a chance to live on a cable network, but presumably USA, TNT and Lifetime had full slates of their own and/or couldn't make the economics work.  No great loss:  the Partners pilot didn't have the look of a show with much potential to be memorable.

Remember the Sideways universe in the last season of Lost?  (I feel your pain; bear with me.)  In particular, remember the storyline where Sawyer and Miles were tough LA detectives, living out their version of a 1970s cop show?  Well, for Battlestar Galactica fans, there was almost a network TV series this year where Lee Adama and Gaius Baltar would have been partnered as homicide cops--and not only that, Six was another detective in the precinct, and Joseph Adama from Caprica was on the force too. 

It wasn't to be, because the pilot for 17TH PRECINCT, produced by Sony Television--and not coincidentally written by Ron Moore, the auteur behind BSG--probably didn't come close to getting onto NBC's schedule.  But there they all were:  Jamie Bamber, James Callis, Tricia Helfer and Esai Morales, together again.  And in case there was any doubt this was an A-list pilot, they were joined by Stockard Channing and Eamonn Walker (from Oz). 

17th Precinct must have looked great on paper, provided by Moore with one of his dense mythologies.  Set in Excelsior, California (a slightly twisted version of San Francisco), it posits a world where magic is everyday, and science doesn't exist.  There are still cars, lights, and other mechanized objects, but they're powered by plants; the equivalent to the internet is the "stream," a band of light that, when touched, supplies information and even prints out documents.  The police are sorcerers, able to manipulate blood spatter to reconstruct a crime, and bring victims briefly back from the dead to get an account of the crime; they shoot spells instead of weapons.  Prophecies affect the stock market, and judges can sentence criminals to instant aging or dislocated bones.  In the closing minutes of the pilot, we learn that the villains of the series would have been the "Stoics," who believe in science and have invented guns.  (Had the show developed, this might have been similar to the philosophical underpinnings of the human vs. Cylon conflict in BSG.)

The idea must have been to create a Harry Potter-like universe without Muggles, one that resembles our own but where magic is taken for granted and technology is mysterious and frightening, all in the context of a procedural cop show.  Unfortunately, the pilot just doesn't work:  the expository dialogue is clumsy and the banter between the characters is worse.  Even though the cast is obviously very fine, none of them have much to play (Morales' cop seems to have switched genders, for unspecified reasons), and some of them, like Channing, seem downright uncomfortable with the mix of cop and fantasy jargon; watching Bamber and Callis, you'd never imagine these two actors had spent years playing intense, multifaceted scenes opposite one another.  The explanation of the pilot's crime is overcomplicated and unconvincing.   There's one sequence that offers a hint of what might have been:  a creepy action sequence set in a house that's been cast with a spell of absolute silence.  But the rest just fails.

THE 2-2 is the deluxe version of Rookie Blue.  It's got a superb pedigree, with a script by Richard Price, acclaimed for his novels ("Bloodbrothers," "Clockers"), screenplays (Sea Of Love, The Color of Money) and television work (The Wire aka The Greatest Cop Show Ever).  The pilot director is James Mangold, whose features include Walk the Line and Knight and Day, and who's just been announced as the director of the Wolverine sequel.  In addition, the show was developed at Robert DeNiro's Tribeca Productions (DeNiro starred in Price's Mad Dog and Glory).  For all that, there's nothing particularly distinctive about the series they've all made.

This being CBS and not ABC, the tone of the piece is more procedural and less soapy than Rookie Blue's.  (We only get one illicit romance.)  And as the participation of Price and DeNiro would suggest, we're on the streets of New York, not in Canada.  But it's essentially the same group of newbie cops, under the supervision of a crusty-but-benign veteran (Terry Kinney).  The 6 cops have backstories, which include a stint in Iraq for Leelee Sobieski's "Whitehouse," a NBA career that ended with a blown knee for "Jackpot" (Harold House Moore), 14 years as a local newspaper reporter for "Lazarus" (Adam Goldberg), etc.  At the start of the episode, they're all told clearly to stay quiet and follow orders--which of course they don't, leading--who would have guessed?--to armed confrontations and unnecessary danger.

Very little of this is surprising or exciting.  The only character immediately suggesting any depth is Goldberg's, who at one point doesn't behave as a TV cop is supposed to.  The rest are foolish and brave, overeager and stressed-out.  If they weren't easily differentiated by gender and ethnic background, they'd practically be interchangeable.  With Price in charge, there's some better-than-average writing, as when Jackpot, who had been a hero (and an arrogant one) to his high school pals, meets one of them on the streets years later., and when he runs into an elderly woman who has strong opinions about his pro basketball career  Mostly, though, it's rudimentary, predictable stuff.  None of the actors manage to stand out, and Mangold's direction is professional but anonymous.

CBS, of course, lives off this genre.  They haven't yet announced a day or time for The 2-2, but it could fit in with any number of their other procedurals.  What may hold it back, though, is its lack of any uniqueness:  the CSI shows have their high-tech jargon, Mentalist its titular protagonist, the new Unforgettable its heroine with her freakish memory--but The 2-2 is plain, down-the-middle police work.  When you finish watching it, you feel like you should fill out a timesheet.

Do you care?  Seriously?  Are you the one watching network television on Saturdays?  There'll be college football on ABC for a while, COPS and AMERICA'S MOST WANTED aren't going anywhere, and the other networks have reruns.