I Watch TV: The Rookie

 

The Rookie

We’re on to season four. Our crop of three rookies from the start of the show are now fully qualified police officers, also one of the actors quit between seasons. As it was a cliffhanger, he’s unceremoniously killed on CCTV, a bad image from behind (probably a double).

To skip to the end of this season the producers have learned their lesson. There are dangling threads, with two characters in the middle of an undercover operation, which would definitely create problems if one left the show, but they’re left at the station, about to go in. And Nolan (Nathan Fillion) has just won a big shoot out in the desert where he’s been sent as retribution for embarrassing the union president. (The desert trip has a reunion with some characters, it’s a frankly head-spinning fun-times-with-goofy-side-characters that transforms into attack-by-international-arms-dealers.)

But back to the start; they introduce a new rookie, Aaron Thorsen, who decided to become a police officer after being wrongly accused of killing his roommate in France. He’s a celebrity who people think they know all about (and perhaps unhelpfully his parents are big in media and trying to help rehabilitate his image). He’s another rookie with something against him that he needs to prove himself! Also they eventually solve the murder in his backstory because the show can’t avoid picking at it’s own stuff.

The show is often in a hurry to get on with it’s stories, perhaps influenced by the tempo of episodes. There will be one minute traffic stops that tell a full story. Often the various characters go out, discover a crime, track them down, get in a fight/chase and then interrogate them to get a confession, and this is the C-plot of the episode.

Nolan has a new girlfriend, Bailey, who is a firefighter, allowing her more screentime by turning up at accidents and crime scenes where there’s a car crash, explosion, fire, or just a casualty (EMTs are part of the LAFD it seems). We’re rapidly introduced to a possible arson case, following which over two episodes various people are set up, framed or otherwise suspected, then they catch the guy, without ever stopping to catch breath and decide what it does to trust in the fire department. And only one scene where Nolan and Bailey are under stress being unable to talk about the investigation to each other before we forget all that.

Which is a pity as this would be a good set up for when Bailey’s husband turns up, the divorce not having gone through while he was in jail. Another two episode story, about stalking and trust and so on and then it’s gone.

It seems a bit churlish of me to complain about a show that is confident with two-and-three episode stories that are complete, in an age of multi-season TV plot-arcs. It’s just that they seem rushed, the same amount of story that gets smeared thinly over 10 or 12 episodes in other shows are compressed into two. I was enjoying skip-tracer Randy as a fun character who was only ever on the phone (police officers aren’t allowed to use department resources to look people up for personal reasons, so they use skip tracer Randy to look up Nolan’s son’s girlfriend (? Probably, I’m doing this from memory)), then after three episodes of “Hello It’s Skip Tracer Randy!” “Yes I know, I called you,” he turns up trying to be a bounty hunter in an elaborate bit of foreplay/competition/team-up with another bounty hunter. And then he vanishes, gone to make room for the next crime.

I’m not coming to a point here. The show attempts to encompass the whole gamut of police procedural, from meticulous detective work, community policing, undercover work, intuitive leaps, walking up to, and sometimes outside, the line, occasionally touching on the legal process, organised crime, kids making mistakes, serial killers, terrorists, cyber-crime, money laundering. It excels when it gives it’s fun cast something interesting to do, being the straight men to a bizarre circumstance. It’s fine when it’s trying to peer into gritty crime, unable to offer anything other than incomplete solutions. The camera-work and editing continue to be good, using body cam and vehicle cam footage to liven up what’s on screen. If something I don’t care about or like happens, well, it’ll be gone in two episodes so that’s okay. I guess I’ll be back to see how the undercover sting goes next season.

Watch This: A cop show with less flaws than most at the cost of less focus
Don’t Watch This: You don’t care about cop shows, no matter how charming