Hey, here’s a concept: a cop who isn’t tormented.
You might have to go back to Andy Taylor and Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show to find a pair of law enforcement personnel as unencumbered by angst as the main guys on a new Netflix series called The Good Cop, which premieres Friday.
T.J. Caruso (Josh Groban, top) and his father Tony Caruso (Tony Danza, top) work for the NYPD. Well, Tony used to work for the NYPD before he spent seven years in prison after being busted in a corruption scandal.
Now, as part of his probation, he has to move in with T.J., a current NYPD detective who’s as straight as his old man was crooked.
Tony obviously has issues. For instance, he still gets some residual perks from the job, like free stuff, and he enjoys that a little too much. T.J. has issues, too, only different issues. He’s obsessive, neurotic and, accordingly, not great with women.
Neither Caruso, however, carries the kind of soul-deep burdens that seem to plague almost every other cop on television. Both are content with who they are. If they snipe at each other all the time, so what? So did Ralph and Alice Kramden.
This lack of inner torment gives a different and rather pleasant tone to The Good Cop, which otherwise plays as a traditional police procedural in which the Carusos take down a bad guy each episode.
The dirty little secret in their collaboration is that Tony isn’t supposed to have any contact with the police, or with police business. But he does live with T.J., and T.J. is prone to sharing. Also, setting aside the graft and corruption part, Tony was and remains a great cop.
He’s got an instinct for looking at a situation and figuring out what happened, and while T.J. seems to have inherited that gene, it never hurts to have an extra pair of skilled eyes.
Besides, the more time Tony spends helping T.J. solve crimes and nail bad guys, the less time he has to go trotting off down the street with the devil who whispers in his other ear.
The two primary support characters in The Good Cop are Cara Vasquez (Monica Barbaro, left) and Burl Loomis (Isiah Whitlock Jr., left), T.J.’s police partner.
Burl, who’s a year and a half from retirement, prefers the sedentary life to, say, a cop’s life. We want him around, though, because he’s got a great droll wit, especially when it’s directed at the office’s young and annoying tech geek.
Cara is Tony’s parole supervisor. She also aspires to become a detective, so she becomes a regular presence in the Caruso lives. This may sound like a setup for Cara and T.J. becoming an item, but given his rigid approach to everything in life, that would take some time and some work.
There could also be one other potential long game in The Good Cop. Seems Tony’s wife and T.J.’s mother, Connie, went missing four years ago, and while Tony is resigned to her being gone, T.J. still keeps the “missing person” posters fresh on local lampposts.
Meanwhile, the case-of-the-week plotlines in The Good Cop move along at a rapid clip. At a time when TV is packed with limited series crime shows where cases unfold slowly over many weeks, The Good Cop sorts out and solves complicated puzzles rather quickly. Which is fine. It’s not The Sinner or Sharp Objects. It works for the kind of show it is.
Danza, to the surprise of no one, is Danza. We know the character. He stays in the pocket. He does what he does.
Groban, better known as a singer, acquits himself adequately as an actor in a role that doesn’t require a lot of tough stretches.
Barbaro and Whitlock Jr. both fill their roles nicely, again given that we’re not talking about Othello here.
The Good Cop was created by Andy Breckman, who specializes in comedy and whose best-known previous show was the quirky Monk. He said he was after a lighter cop show that still had some substance, and the early episodes suggest he’s on track.