2016-2017, 18 episodes: Murtaugh is a straight-arrow cop, Riggs is
his ker-razy partner.
That really is about all there is to it. I was hoping for some
vaguely original spin on the whole buddy-cop thing, which let's face
it has been done to death, buried, dug up, stitched back together, and
done to death again. It's a copy of a copy of a copy and should only
have been made if someone involved felt there was something new to say
about this worn-flat setup. But no, this is a Fox show, and while all
the networks are somewhat guilty it seems that Fox is sometimes
particularly averse to showing anything that might confuse its
audience or cause them to have to think.
But it can actually get worse than that. Riggs in the films was the
wild and wacky comedic kind of broken; here his genre whipsaws between
cheerfully blowing stuff up and being seriously depressed about the
death of his wife (she was pregnant, of course, and turns up in lots
of flashbacks), getting drunk and contemplating suicide. Now that's
entertainment, ha ha ha ha ha. Meanwhile this iteration of Murtaugh is
trying to do stereotyped masculine roles from the 1950s (though not,
of course, black roles ditto) while surrounded by a family that's
actually living in the modern world.
And then they're thrown into various wacky crime situations. Things
get blowed up real good (the series' one good point) in between the
endless cuts to brief shots of swaying breasts and buttocks, a
desperate attempt to keep the viewer's limbic system engaged. The cast
do the best they can with some terrible material; I'd like to see
Clayne Crawford (Riggs) with an actual script rather than raw output
from the Plot-o-Matic. You can predict scene by scene what's going to
happen. It goes without saying that the cops are always good, and
always right, and completely justified in everything they do. Every
episode ends with a cheap moral lesson on the importance of Family.
Cthulhu help us, the series is bringing in six million and more
viewers per episode, and has been renewed.
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