NYC 22

NYC 22

Series Premiere

By: Carlos Uribe

NYC 22 is a show about rookie cops.

NYC 22 is about the rookie cops for New York City's 22^nd precinct. It comes from author Richard Price, known for The Wanderers and Clockers. The ensemble drama clearly isn't going to be the next big good cop show. It has premiered to low ratings and I only see the ratings dropping after this episode. This simply was not a good premiere. It was filled with the same cop clichés that the audience has seen time and time again while not really doing anything new with them. It also doesn't look like the show wants to do anything new, as it's complacent with merely being just another cop drama. This lack of ambition has created a premiere that feels utterly predictable and dull. It won't be winning any fans except for those that maybe love the genre to death. Even those genre fans will have a hard time falling in love with this show since they could just watch any other cop show that get much better results.

A premiere for a procedural like this show is supposed to show how each episode is essentially going to work. This premiere does an excellent job in this regard. I know how exactly each episode is going to work. The cops will patrol the city and get into some circumstances that quickly get dangerous. A good thing for any pilot to do is to have one of these circumstances quickly go south. This tends to show that the characters are in actual danger and that the show is willing to risk hurting them. This episode doesn't do any of that. It shows all of the weekly plots wrapping up without them getting to bad for the characters. This ensures that the tension that actually does exist for rookie cops in life-and-death situations doesn't transcend to the viewer. This makes it harder to the series to take seriously, which is difficult enough with the general light-beat attitude this show has. An attitude that most of the time doesn't work at an ensemble cop show.

What's even worse for an ensemble cop show is that none of characters made any impression on me. I constantly kept getting them confused since they kept blending in together. The episode spent a large time with each of the rookies but it didn't really let any of them shine. It also didn't let any of them develop beyond just clichés. This made each cop feel like just a disposable character on a cop show and this made it hard for me to care about them. If the show wants people to tune in to a ensemble cop show then it needs to make us care more about the cops. It needs to be more about three-dimensional human beings rather than just have them be fill-in-the-blank flat characters. This is probably what hurts the show most of all. It doesn't matter if the show had a good enough plot to keep things interesting and a weekly circumstance that goes south if I could care less about any of these characters. If the show had at least one character stand out, then I might have seen promise in this show.

It is so disappointing then when not one stands out. This isn't due to bad acting, except for the actress who played the cop who comes from a criminal family. She was just the worst and I hated every second that she was on the screen. This has some pretty fine actors. It's simply that they are not given any material to be able to shine. That's just how flat and dull and stereotypical these characters all ended up being. They are also put into situations that other shows have done a million times before and the show doesn't bother to add a fresh spin to any of them. This means that the actors are playing overused cop characters that are put in situations that the viewer has seen before. It's really made it hard for them to stand out.

A lot of people are comparing this show with every other CBS show. This isn't just another CBS cop show. Most of the CBS cop shows are about detectives, solving one or two crimes throughout an episode. This is more about cops that are on the streets. This does give it a small distinction but it's too much like other shows about cops that are on the streets. This makes NYC 22 derivative and something not worth checking out unless you've never seen a cop show before. At this point, I wouldn't bother checking into this show.