Rookie Blue, “Fresh Paint”: overly (un)serious

ROOKIE BLUE - "Fresh Paint"

There are several major problems which I fear can’t be solved without a substantial retooling of the show.

While the cop show is obviously well explored terrain of the televised drama, I like the concept of this one quite a bit: hanging out with a group of greenhorn cops as they get schooled in learning how to deal with the mean streets.

Unfortunately, in practice Rookie Blue doesn’t deliver on its promise, at least as much as a pilot episode can tell us.

There are several major problems which I fear can’t be solved without a substantial retooling of the show. The tone of the show is a somewhat but not overly serious affair, with lots of inclinations that we’re going to see plenty of the cops’ personal sides and get into some soap-y and romance-y stuff. However, the police stuff – where we spend most of our time – gets blown out of the water by far superior, gritty, and more realistic shows such as The Shield, The Wire, and Southland. For starters, these rookies look like models – or at least waiters in emo-friendly restaurants – instead of young cops. I’m not saying that cops can’t be good looking, but even beyond the physical attributes the casting is clearly off.

The situations also did not smack of the realism that modern cop show audiences come to expect. Take rookie Andy McNally’s (Missy Peregrym, who was terrific as another Andy in the sadly cancelled Reaper) adventures on the first day of the job. Left to her own devices in searching for bad guys in a building after shots were fired, it seemed obvious to me that the mistakes she made should have had far more serious consequences. And the sequence in which she eventually hauls in two baddies (one of whom turns out to be an undercover cop and, we presume, a future love interest) is laughably clunky: the pair casually walk out onto a fire escape when Andy pulls a gun on them, and then equally casually hang out around the corner from the building waiting to be found and arrested? Sorry, at that point I was fully checked out.

Some of the above could have been forgiven if the intent was to be a different kind of a show. Take fellow new cop show, The Good Guys, which has its collective tongue fully in in cheek in following the adventures of odd couple cop partners (played by Colin Hanks and Bradley Whitford) in Dallas. The Good Guys doesn’t ask to be taken seriously at all, but even so they manage to amp up the adrenaline level and suspense when it counts. Even a show like Life On Mars managed to be reasonably realistic even in following the oddball and science fiction-ish adventures of a cop who believes he has traveled through time back to the swinging early 1970s of New York City. (It occurs to me that I’m not really sure where Rookie Blue takes place… and that I don’t really care.)

In any event, I made it through the Rookie Blue pilot, if but barely. Not sure if I’ll roll the dice on episode numero dos.

This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.

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