Fox's 'Good Guys' is a Familiar Original

When you summer with the broadcast networks, you probably have to settle for good enough.
Cable networks, blessed as they are with lower ratings demands that are more in tune with summer's lower viewership, have long been able to give us their best while broadcast rests.
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Well, now the resting is over as broadcast networks respond to those wandering hot-weather viewers with more original programming of their own, much of it reality contests or scripted imports, but original to us nonetheless. Still, the goal is not so much to win new viewers as to avoid losing all their old ones.
And so you get The Good Guys, a lightweight summer diversion that has a special preview Wednesday night before moving to a regular Monday slot in June. Yes, Fox just announced that it also has plans for the show for fall, but its plans are dependent on yours. If you don't spend time with the show in the summer, you may not see it come fall.
Created by Matt Nix, who has given us cable's most popular original series, Burn Notice, this tightly budgeted, retro-tinged buddy comedy stars Bradley Whitford and Colin Hanks as mismatched cops.
Whitford is Dan Stark, a rule-breaking former minor celebrity (he saved the governor's son's life a few decades ago) now consigned to minor crimes. Hanks is Jack Bailey, a tightly wound newbie assigned to babysit Stark: his punishment for correcting his boss's grammar.
Bailey's goal is to escape Stark. Stark's goal, aside from sleeping around, is to convince Bailey that there are no minor crimes, just minor cops. And to do so, he proceeds to turn a routine robbery investigation into a one-of-a-kind drug bust — with the aid of an eccentric crop of criminals that includes a drug runner who yearns to look like Erik Estrada and an honor-bound, second-ranked assassin who wants to move up in the ranks.
As he proved with Burn Notice, Nix has a knack for creating off-beat characters and neatly twisted plots — and for the most part it serves him well here. There are times when the show feels too much like Elmore Leonard Lite, a particular problem at the moment as the real Leonard is on better display on FX with Justified. But this is hardly the first time two TV shows have shared a similar approach, and it most assuredly won't be the last.
Sporting a hideous, much-mocked mustache that could be a character in its own right, Whitford inhabits his role with the laid-back, reassuring ease of a true television professional — a fine actor working at top speed. Hanks is a bit of a harder sell. You get the feeling you're supposed to notice and appreciate every trick of the actor's trade, but there's potential in the performance, assuming Hanks is willing and able to relax into it.
And after all, if you can't relax in summer, when can you?
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