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Not a Cop OutSouthland is pretty good, and thus temporarily halts the sad decline of NBC.

By Troy PattersonPosted Wednesday, May 13, 2009, at 8:09 PM ET

Ben McKenzie in SouthlandThough certainly not a hit, the new cop show Southland (NBC, Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET) is not a ratings abomination either, much to the vexation of some of us on the TV beat. NBC—soundly established as the fourth-place network, headed by a dude widely believed to be a total clown—is growing more pathetic by the sweeps week. For the TV season currently drawing to a close, its failures include the Knight Rider remake, Crusoe, Kings, My Own Worst Enemy, Kath & Kim, and Chopping Block. In their particular awfulness—in the extravagant crassitude of their conception—these new shows inspired a hostility that needs purging.

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To be clear, all of NBC's new shows this season were failures, with the recent exceptions of Parks and Recreation (which continues to get by on good will and second banana Aziz Ansari) and the program under review. These two nonfailures throw a kink in the tale of the network's decline. In announcing plans to give Jay Leno a five-nights-a-week prime-time show, NBC already gave notice that it was shriveling. Why can't it just shrivel up and die? Now that's a story. We're looking for a satisfying emotional climax here.

Alas, Southland is OK. Set in Los Angeles, that paragon of racial harmony and social cohesion, it patrols much the same turf as The Shield and Colors and Training Day and so on. Does it have anything new to say about serving and protecting around those parts? Forget it, Jake. But it says all the old things in a relatively urbane style. Mercifully, it skips the club-music forensic-lab scenes that have turned so many police procedurals into volumes of Now That's What I Call Evidence! It's a character-driven show. One character, taking a screenwriting course in his spare time, even sits in a classroom where the phrase character is story is all-caps'd across a whiteboard. Driving, the characters mostly stay in their lanes, zipping along without any major accidents.

Here, when the hard-drinking macho detective crashes his car and loses his weapon, the pace of the search feels fresh, even if the off-screen retrieval of the gun is too easy. When the divorced female detective tentatively lets her guard down at a dinner date, at least it's Regina King in the part, doing her persuasive tough-but-wounded thing. When the pretty-boy rookie officer endures hazing by his colleagues before earning their respect, at least he is really quite pretty.

Southland goes a little heavy on the heft now and then—the shots of weary eyes in rear-view mirrors, the scene where a white cop bonds with a black kid over a copy of Beloved. At one point, a character's back story rears up all gothiclike, and the show indulges a plot that a telenovela producer would dismiss as risible. Those bits of nonsense are balanced by engaging performances, with actress Emily Bergl earning laughter, some of it wonderfully nervous, as the wiggy spouse of a wound-up cop. She tries to smoke pot in her bathroom and then wonders why her drug-sniffing dog is flipping out. Such are the moments that earn Southland distinction as Might-Or-Might-Not-See TV.

There is another thing people have been saying about Southland (beyond ruing that it is not a career-ending embarrassment for executives who deserve to have their careers ended as embarrassingly as possible). The other thing is that the show feels like a broadcaster's cautious attempt to make a cable drama. Its narrative ambitions aren't negligible, and its tone is ostentatiously edgy. (The dialogue includes curses that the soundtrack bleeps out. Maybe this is a stab at verisimilitude, or maybe Southland, like a seventh-grader, is swearing in an attempt to look cool.) Does the show's relative success foreshadow a niche-market NBC? Could it please go gently now?

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

COMMENTS

I agree with your basic premise: All of the freshman NBC were terrible. Even Parks and Recreation doesn't really deserve a spot in the lineup, but there's not really anything to take its place. But, really, what new shows really have been successful this year?

I tend to root for NBC because I find that most of the shows I look forward to seeing are on it. And frankly, I'd take the network that has 30 Rock, Friday Night Lights, Life, and so on over, say, CBS, which fills its schedule with reality shows and CSI spinoffs, or Fox, which is way too quick to cancel shows.

-- Colage
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I agree with that take, insofar as this network TV season being horrible. I can't think of a freshman show I've watched for more than 3 episodes this season and felt like I wanted to see next year. Fine, I watched every episode of Parks and Recreation so far, but it's only due to how it's sandwiched between two shows I follow.

CBS might have had a hit or two this season, but I have not watched a single episode of those. Dollhouse on Fox looks promising, but it took so long for the show's premise to pay off that I am surprised by the fact that Fox did not cancel it before airing all the episodes it had commissioned. Serials in general have been experiencing a slow agonizing death, and sitcoms have gone a step backward. Less of them are peppered with an irritating laugh track, but there seems to be a trend to returning into the safe confines of family-based sitcoms from the heartland. Nothing wrong with it, but it was milked to death in the late 80s and early 90s, and 90% of it wasn't good back then.

I love the Office and 30 Rock, but with the advent of cable channels rebroadcasting them at will (little known fact: Time Warner is experimenting with a Network TV in-demand feature which is for now free of charge to its subscribers), and Hulu having them available within days, I find less and less of a reason to watch NBC. Quel dommage!

The article is right about one thing: putting Leno on Primetime and thus creating a five day nighttime talk show smells like giving up and cutting costs. It didn't work when ABC did it, either. I don't have a problem with the concept per se, but I feel that it will just be "The Tonight Show" before the news, and Leno is probably the least funny of all current talk show hosts on the nightly schedule.

-- acj
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NBC's identity crisis is as bad for audiences as it is for NBC. Silverman recently declined to renew Life, which was smart, character-driven drama, a cop show without an overuse of props, badly lit labs, bad police interrogation, or silly wardrobe choices. The episodes defied formula, the dialogue sparkled and the characters flawed, vulnerable, strong, human and humane. Charlie Crews was the most memorable character to hit the small screen in a long time and Damian Lewis was amazing. But giving it a Season 2 lead in of Knight Rider was bad enough, having a new-ish show up against the Idol juggernaut another. That's where good shows go to die. If they really wanted to be the new HBO they'd stop insulting us with mediocrity and give really good shows a chance to find their feet.

-- Kristin T
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