A-Ville for effort, D-Ville for execution
There are a lot of things to like about Fox’s K-Ville, premiering Monday at 9 on Fox. It actually features working-class characters, many of them black, which is a refreshing change from the mass of super-rich white people that populate most of this fall’s new shows. It’s not set in New York, L.A., Miami, or San Francisco, but rather New Orleans, giving it a flavor that no other series can match. It’s actually shot on location in New Orleans, with a crew largely made up of locals, pumping money into the city’s shattered economy.
Also, producer Jonathan Lisco (NYPD Blue, The District) wrote TV critics a very nice personal letter explaining how important the show’s subject matter was and how much the show means to the city of New Orleans, and how Lisco had ridden along with city police officers in the trying days immediately after Hurricane Katrina had hit.
These are all good things, and based on all of them, I almost want K-Ville to succeed. But if this police drama is to survive, it will need to rapidly improve from its quite horrible first episode. I’m not optimistic. The plot is ridiculous, an over-the-top murder conspiracy that features so many car chases and exchanges of gunfire that I suddenly wondered if I had accidentally jostled my TV and flipped to a cable channel populated with 1970s crime dramas.
Anthony Anderson is appealing as Martin Boulet, a cop so committed to his community that he flies into a fury when someone in the neighborhood tries to sell their house and move away. His previous partner abandoned him at the height of the flooding, but follows him around like a stray dog, hoping to weasel his way back onto the force. Boulet’s new partner, Cobb (Cole Hauser), says he’s a former marine from Illinois by way of of Afghanistan, but there’s something not quite right about him. There are also other cops straight out of central casting and, as you might expect, an authoritarian police captain who keeps reminding loose-cannon Boulet to go by the book and not take so many chances.
I really wanted to like K-Ville, I really did. There’s a place for a good show about working-class people in New Orleans on television, and the money the show’s pumping into the New Orleans community is a feel-good story if ever I heard one. Unfortunately, the story on the screen can’t match up. Take away the New Orleans aspect, and K-Ville is every cop show ever made. And not in a good way.
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