Robert Sebree/FOX
There are things you want to do and things you have to do. I want to review K-Ville for the show it could have been–a cop drama that portrays post-Katrina New Orleans by showing the struggle to maintain order. I have to review it for what it actually is: an unimpressive police procedural with a few social and character elements shoehorned in. I want to praise it for giving a lead role to Anthony Anderson, who was so good in The Shield. I have to pan it for wasting him in a show that just reminds you how good The Shield is by comparison.
K-Ville, for its part, wants to be a different, timely and relevant show about a part of the country that TV drama has still mostly ignores after two years. But what it has to be–I suspect under network pressure, after so many ambitious serial dramas failed last season–is a mostly dumbed-down crime-of-the-week show, in which the crimes and their resolutions are not interesting enough to justify the compromise.
The premise behind K-Ville is strong enough: Martin Boulet (Anderson) is an NOPD cop who’s stuck it out in his city–and his neighborhood, the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward–even as his fellow cops have split and his wife has left for Atlanta with their flood-traumatized daughter. He’s paired with Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser), a cop with a suspect past who’s appeared out of nowhere. Boulet doesn’t trust Cobb, but the department is too strapped to turn down a warm body willing to work.
If the idea had been sold to FX, or another cable network freer to go all in with the concept, this could have been a show worth talking about. As it is, the first two episodes are by-rote whodunits with a little local color and glimpses of New Orleans’ desperate straits thrown in. (Some post-flood graffiti reads, “FEMA: Fix Everything My Ass.”) This compromise might have worked if the two halves of the show–the want to and have to halves–had been better integrated. But the procedural elements are so ordinary, it’s jarring when K-Ville suddenly shows signs of broader purpose, with stories of prison labor used to rebuild New Orleans and police precinct houses where the copy machines don’t work.
The problem with this kind of mash-up is that raw realism is incompatible with the police procedural fantasy world, where cases get solved in an hour. The Shield handles this by having some stories stretch out for seasons, others for several episodes. Vic Mackey and the Strike Team knock out some cases in an episode, but usually by extra-legal means–which both underscores the themes of the show and makes the point that no real cop could get results so often so quickly without busting heads.
In K-Ville, on the other hand, Boulet and Cobb are just police who live in a real city, but work in TV Cop Land. It could have turned out better, but what we ended up with is a crime.