Premiere Week: K-Ville
I didn’t actually watch this last week when it debuted because I wasn’t ready to start burning through television yet.
Fox’s K-Ville is a cop show set in post-Katrina New Orleans. Anthony Anderson’s Martin Boulet is a cop who was abandoned by his partner during the Katrina clean-up. Two years later Boulet is cracking under the pressure of fighting a losing battle in the city. Cole Hauser plays his recently arrived partner Trevor Cobb.
- Pros
- It’s a cop show not set in New York. Bonus points for originality.
- The idea of dramatizing the crime in New Orleans is a good one. Although it will be interesting to see how they dramatize it. Smash & grab crime isn’t really interesting. I’d rather all of them not be about how much the rich white folk are trying to stick it to the Ninth Ward. That might get old quickly.
- Ethan and Bernard from Lost found work.
- Cons
- The show is about as stereotypical a cop show as it comes. The mis-matched partners who don’t trust each other at first but then become buddies toward the end. They form a shaky partnership at the end and Boulet agrees to keep Cobb’s dark secret: when the flood hit he was in prison, but since all of New Orleans’ computer records were wiped out, he was able to make a fresh start.
- The characters in the pilot come off as sterotyped as every cop movie ever. Boulet and Cobb are the cops who operate outside the box and they have the typical chief who hates their procedure but respects their results. I’ve seen this movie before.
- Parts of the show ring even less true than standard cop shows. After the first assault on a fund-raiser, the new partners take to the streets in a car chase. They’re shooting at the car they’re chasing… on the freeway. Probably not the safest thing to do.
- The premise that all of New Orleans criminal records were gone and all the criminals that were in the prisons just had to walk out the doors to be free seems like a bit of a stretch. I mean, I know it’s a convenient backstory and everything and makes for an interesting character, but I think it probably can be explained a little better. It maps out a lot of future episodes. Someone else on the force finds out. Some officer remembers him. His old contacts expose him. His partner lords it over his head.
Final Thought: One more episode next week to give me something to care about. After that it’s off the list.
One quote to take away: “There’s more loose ends here than a whore-house.”