Cop shows are a staple of series television, with new ones rolled out nearly every season. But over the years, only a handful have managed to transcend the genre and become something more than interchangeable crime procedurals featuring clipped dialogue, cardboard characters, and the occasional burst of action.
From Dragnet and M Squad in the 1950s through Hill Street Blues in the '80s, NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Street in the '90s and more recently, The Shield and The Wire, it's a fairly short list of those that, to one degree or another, have been exceptions to the rule.
The latest attempt to cook up something different from a very old recipe is Southland, which will premiere at 10 p.m. Thursday on NBC. The one-hour drama follows the lives of cops, criminals, and victims as they intersect in some of the more unsavory sections of Los Angeles.
The series has a fairly sizeable cast of characters, but the primary focus is on rookie patrolman Ben Sherman (played by Benjamin McKenzie, formerly a young heartthrob on the Fox teen drama The O.C.). Fresh out of the police academy, Ben's heart is in the right place, but he's not sure he's got what it takes to be a cop in L.A.
That skepticism is shared by his training officer, John Cooper, a tough, cynical veteran of the force played by Michael Cudlitz (Band of Brothers). Cooper wastes little time trying to knock fuzzy visions of police work out of young Ben's head.
"You do what they teach you in the academy, you will die," he tells the rookie early on his first day. "A knucklehead wants to take your gun, so if it's you or some 300-pound naked guy on PCP, you take [him] down any way you can."
Like so many cop shows before it, Southland is described by its network as "gritty," which mostly means that it uses high-def, handheld cameras and quick cuts in trying to create a sometimes disturbing perspective on big-city crime. As one character puts it, spending time in the streets of L.A.'s underbelly is "like driving through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat."
But the show's attempts at realism are inevitably undercut by the usual restrictions that are applied to all shows on broadcast networks - particularly in the language used by its characters. But Southland handles that limitation in a slightly different manner than most shows. Instead of substituting absurd euphemisms like "dirtbag" or "hairball" for the coarser language that real cops might favor, it simply goes ahead with the foul language, then bleeps the offensive words out of the finished product.
The members of the ensemble cast are solid, particularly Regina King (Ray), Tom Everett Scott (from TNT's underappreciated Saved), and Shawn Hatosy (Alpha Dog) as detectives trying to balance their work and private lives. It will take a while to sort out all the different players, but the producers are giving several of them back stories to latch onto.
In a sidelight that might prove to be interesting in future episodes, one of the show's primary macho characters is said to be openly gay, but there's little sign of it in the initial episode.
It's important that the show's supporting players come across as multi-dimensional, because based on the premiere episode, the situations faced by Southland's cops aren't anything that TV audiences haven't seen before. That means it's the characters, not the capers, that will make or break the show.
The series may have a better chance than most of succeeding, because the guy behind it is John Wells, the Emmy-winning producer of ER and The West Wing, two of the more nuanced and intelligent shows to appear on network television in recent years. But then again, Wells was also responsible for such forgettable fare as Smith and Jonny Zero.
So as Southland takes over the recently concluded ER's Thursday night time slot, we'll have to wait and see if it turns out to be a worthy successor, or just another gritty yet generic, trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.
First Published April 8, 2009, 9:55 p.m.
