Even with plenty of "high-concept" television on the air, good, sturdy series often still hail from the most typical of places. CBS's new police procedural Battle Creek is indeed a new CBS police procedural. Yet, the series—which was created by Vince Gilligan and sold to the network long before Breaking Bad, to now be shepherded by House executive producer David Shore—combines all the familiar notes of the TV cop show and plays them in a slightly different fashion. Sometimes, after a new beat here and a swapped-out riff there, the music is immediately recognizable but just a tiny bit better.
Battle Creek centers on the ramshackle police department of Battle Creek, Michigan, a moderately sized town facing the slow, churning death of globalization and lost jobs. That descent extends to the underfunded professionals who've vowed to protect and serve: Russ Agnew (Dean Winters) and Fontanelle White (Kal Penn) are the city's detective A-Team, and when a relatively simple sting goes awry due to some faulty equipment, their pleas for more money and support are finally heard... sort of. Instead of better tasers and recording devices, Battle Creek gets the handsome, smooth-talking FBI Special Agent Milt Chamberlin (Josh Duhamel). And as Milt takes the reigns in Battle Creek, Russ's ego rips into overdrive, resulting in a whole lot of frustration and wise-cracking—but also some solid police work.
As far as labored, mismatched buddy copy set-ups go, Battle Creek's is pretty low on the list. The pilot waves away the premise-y nature of it all by name-dropping the FBI's resident agencies, of which there are nearly 400 across the country, according to my friend Google. Winters' Russ is the shaggy dog, Duhamel's Milt is the well-dressed charmer, and everyone else—including Penn, unfortunately—is along for the ride.
Winters and Duhamel thrive in their individual roles and bounce off one another pretty well (I've already seen a few episodes of Battle Creek, and the show improves in each one). If you're a big Winters fan like I am, you've probably been waiting for him to score a choice lead role like this, and his performance doesn't disappoint. "The Battle Creek Way" required him to play up Russ's frustration with Milt in a very pilot-y fashion, but those brief moments didn't bother me all too much. I'm guessing that viewers will be more divided on Duhamel, who in my mind has been wrongfully discarded as just a pretty face. Dude is certainly handsome, but in projects like Battle Creek, he's able to handle comedy, action, and more dramatic material fairly successfully. While the first episode's stakes weren't especially high, Milt's arrival in Battle Creek had a bit of a mystery to it, and so Duhamel got to play with that just enough in a very unfussy fashion.
What makes Battle Creekan admirable entry in the buddy-cop genre—and what helped the pilot get through some of its more establishing beats—is that it has a really fun sense of humor. "The Battle Creek Way" didn't strain to deliver jokes or produce the kind of banter that we normally see on shows like this, but it delivered them nonetheless. The opening sequence, which spotlighted the sheer lack of resources that Russ and Fontanelle must deal with when trying to do their jobs, was a nicely paced and well-executed bit of comedic storytelling that primed the audience for failure, only to turn in something contextually funnier than we could've imagined.
Generally, the pilot benefited from a bunch of smaller elements that came together pretty nicely: Russ desperately trying to change his department's fortunes by cold-calling 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl, the calming of the big police siege on the drug lord's home when the guy politely invited them in, the final moment where we were led to believe that Russ had finally earned his moment in the sun thanks to the great media coverage, only for the newspaper to cut his face out of the photo... none of that stuff screamed JOKES, but it effectively established the messy-but-charming nature of these characters and of Battle Creek itself.
It'll be easy to attribute the success of this first episode to Gilligan, and while that's not unreasonable, it also doesn't paint the entire picture, nor does it properly modulate viewer expectations. To the latter point, Battle Creek is not Breaking Bad—not even in terms ofBreaking Bad's more darkly funny early episodes. It might be a little closer to the brand-newBetter Call Saul in tone, but even that's not a particularly productive comparison. Though Gilligan helped birth one of the greatest and most innovative TV shows in the medium's history, he's also a dude who's been in the proverbial trenches, churning out solid (and sometimes bad) TV. Battle Creek and its pilot feel as if they're rooted in that entirely professional but not entirely stupendous background, and that's totally okay.
And to the former point, Gilligan shares a co-credit on the pilot with Shore, another TV veteran who knows how to mix comedy and drama within the context of the procedural storytelling engine. It's not surprising that Shore is involved with this project, both because CBS likely wanted a reliable hand to guide the show post-pilot once Gilligan stepped away and because Shore has tried to reboot The Rockford Files a couple of times in the past few years and clearly has an interest in this kind of project. Battle Creek has a long, long way to go before it'll be ready to entertain any comparisons to The Rockford Filesand neither of its stars can touch James Garner, but Battle Creek's early episodes absolutely convey the fact that Shore is really reveling in the show's world, and its characters in particular.
Shore's preexisting relationship with director Bryan Singer means that this opener boasted another big name behind the camera (for what it's worth, I'd posit that Gilligan not directing it was a pretty clear sign that he's not super interested in working with the show very closely). Singer's work here was much better than his work on the House pilot so many years ago, which was quite an ugly TV episode to look at. It's disappointing that CBS and Sony didn't want to try to shoot on location in Michigan, so we're stuck with Los Angeles trying and failing to capture the midwest of it all, but Singer shoots confidently and effectively. And "The Battle Creek Way" didn't contain a major action sequence that the show will never be able to afford in the future, which I kind of like. The stakes are smaller, and that's refreshing in a world where shows like Scorpiontrade in MAJOR WORLD EVENTS immediately and then have to film a second episode.
Battle Creek's introductory hour did struggle to use many of the show's supporting players, who are pretty strong. Janet McTeer, Damon Herriman, Liza Lapira, and Aubrey Dollar are all recognizable faces who simply served to populate the police station in Episode 1. And as I hinted at above, I was especially bummed to see Penn sidelined so quickly; while that changes a little in Episode 2, which gives his character a fun subplot and some good scenes with Duhamel's Milt, it does appear that Battle Creek is still trying to feel out everyone's role in the weekly storylines. And that's fine—I just don't want these folks to go to waste.
As a pilot, "The Battle Creek Way" gave us a lot to like. Winters and Duhamel were good, the shaggy nature of the story and tone really worked, and Battle Creek immediately convinced me that it knows what kind of show it is. I'm not quite sure how the series jives with the range of other procedurals that CBS already has on its schedule, but the good news is that the network chose to air it on Sundays, a de facto night for prestige television. That suggests CBS is aware that its normal audience might be lukewarm on Battle Creek; the question is whether or not people who wouldn't normally tune in for a CBS series will take to it. But I hope they will, as there's enough promise here that I'll continue watching for awhile, which is not something I'd say about most of the network's other dramatic output.
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