Feuding siblings fight small-town crime (and each other) in mirth-laced police procedural Good Cop/Bad Cop. David Michael Brown opens a case file on the new show.
Mixing the small-town tree-lined quirkiness of Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks with the quick-witted comedy hijinks of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Will & Grace producer John Quaintance’s charming Good Cop/Bad Cop is a beguiling, odd couple police procedural that sees every unsolved case tempered with mirth. Quaintance, who cut his teeth working on sitcoms like Friends spin-off Joey and rom-com Notes from The Underbelly, describes the show as living “somewhere between Fargo and the Knives Out movies, with the joke count and fast banter of Moonlighting“.
The odd couple in question is a sister-and-brother detective team forced to sleuth together in the small Pacific Northwest town of Eden Vale, population 9,347—soon to be 9,346. “One good thing about this town, you can always get a good description of a gun and a truck!”
The feuding siblings are thwarted by the colourful residents, a serious lack of police resources and some good old fashioned self-sabotage thanks to their complicated family dynamic with each other. Not to mention with police chief Big Hank Hickman (Clancy Brown), who also happens to be their dad.
One of the pair is played by Gossip Girl’s Queen Bee herself, Leighton Meester, but the bling of the television show in which she made her name as Blair Waldorf is long gone. Now she plays a down-to-earth local Detective Lou Hickman, a police officer who uses her charm and pleasant demeanour to get answers from unsuspecting criminals, many of whom she knows (or at least knows their mothers). That is until she gets a new partner.
Unfortunately for Lou, the other half of the partnership is her younger brother who has the “social skills of a serial killer”. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina star Luke Cook plays her abrasive know-it-all sibling Henry, a gifted but overly confident, blunt, hyper fixating detective who is hired by his estranged father.
Fighting crime and each other, Lou and Henry find themselves occasionally and begrudgingly enjoying each other’s company as their close proximity drudges up memories of all the things they did like about each other as kids before family dramas and rampant egos drove them apart. While Lou’s kind persona and knowledge of the locals ensures she is seen as the more genial of the pair. Henry on the other hand, rubs everyone up the wrong way. As they work together, however, both find themselves being the good cop and the bad cop.
With a chief determined to keep the crime numbers down by fudging the figures and changing jurisdiction, the pair are foiled at every turn. Lou is usually beaten to the scene-of-the-crime by the dreamy Shane Carson (Devon Terrell) from the County Sheriff’s department. And like Cybill Shepherd’s glamorous sleuth and Bruce Willis wise-cracking gumshoe in Moonlighting, the yearning “will they? won’t they?” relationship adds a splash of romance to proceedings as the obviously attracted to each other pair try to up their flirting game with often woefully tragic results.
The rest of the EVPD is made up of affable Officer Joe Bradley (Scott Lee), nervous but big-hearted new boy Officer Sam Szczepkowski (William McKenna), officious Officer Sarika Ray (Shamita Siva) and dispatcher Lily Lim (Grace Chow). Throw in Phillipa Northeast as Henry’s old flame Dr Marci Lane, Blazey Best as Big Hank’s eccentric Russian girlfriend Nadia. Throw in Lincoln Lewis and Boy Swallows Universe breakout star Felix Cameron and you have a delightful and largely Australian ensemble. All boasting a fine line in American accents—or Russian, in Best’s case.
Shot in Queensland, the show is a who’s who of Antipodean talent on both sides of the camera. Phil Lloyd (Review with Myles Barlow) is co-executive producer, Trent O’Donnell (No Activity, The Moodys) directs alongside Anne Renton (The Good Doctor), Gracie Otto (Bump) and Corrie Chen (Bad Behaviour). Despite this large Aussie contingent, the show belies its Aussie origins. Not once do you ever doubt that the cameras are aimed at the leafy environs of Washington State rather than the Sunshine State in Australia.
Like all the best TV police shows, it’s the character development across the episodes where Good Cop/Bad Cop shines. Yes, each episode boasts a crime that puts Lou and Henry through their paces. But the overall story arcs ensure that you care about these characters. In their first case two separate criminals rob a chemist at the same time. One wearing a Ronald Reagan mask like Patrick Swayze in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break and the other a hockey goal keepers mask à la Robert De Niro in Michael Mann’s Heat. In fact, throughout the show there are references to film and television. Even David Lynch’s groundbreaking television show gets a mention.
Talking of classic television, Good Cop/Bad Cop also sees Meester briefly sharing the screen with another television icon from the 2000s who also happens to be her IRL husband. Adam Brody, now better known as the hot rabbi from Nobody Wants This, had teen hearts swooning back in 2007 playing Seth Cohen in The O.C., makes a cameo that will have Gen Z hearts fluttering. For the rest of us, there is still plenty to investigate in this cop comedy.
