The Unusuals

I wanted to LOVE The Unusuals. I wanted to lament it's cancellation and decry that dreck like Two and a Half Men still infects the airwaves. But I found the show to be more shrug-worthy. If this is supposed to be a satire of your typical police procedural, it needed to go for it harder, better and truly commit. If this is supposed to be a more straight-laced police procedural with a healthy dose of quirk, then it just never congealed correctly.

The biggest problems with the show are evident in the pilot, and never truly get addressed or even dealt with. But it's hard to deal with a problem when the problem is the casting choice of your lead actress. Amber Tamblyn, as likable as she may be, is never for one second believable as a New York City cop. In fact, she wouldn't be believable as a cop in any city. She's so soft, sweet and dewy that it verges on the comical to watch her try and fight a criminal, or play tough with the boys. She's like someone's younger sister who dropped in to play with the cooler, older, more bad-ass kids. It never works. (Of course, she's also handicapped by written as slow-witted to the point of distraction. It's not intentional, but things that are easily sign-posted to the audience seem like unimaginable, tenuous at best, connections to her character. She would have been let go from the force after 30 minutes in the real world.)

The rest of the cast tries to give it their collective all, but they can't elevate the material that they're given to work with. Fancy tricks in editing like giving you high velocity music and frantic editing to try and enliven the pace and tone of the show are easily discernible smoke-and-mirrors. The scripts try to wring out drama and pathos for their characters, but everything always ends up being too pat and neatly resolved. There's never any sense that these characters are ever in any true danger. The storylines hit every cop-show cliche with an elan that makes you think that the writers don't know that they're dropping into predictability so easily.

It's of interest because it's straining for a quirky tone, but beneath the pristine (but, and we're beaten with this over-the-head in dialog numerous times, deeply corrupt) police station that's really all that there is to this show. What a pity, it had a great cast.