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As posted on Hijinks Inc:
The debut season is now 5 episodes in and I took the opportunity to get caught up this week. I went into it with very modest expectations, because I hadn’t heard wonderful things about it, but I must say, I came away pleasantly surprised.
The Good Guys is created by Matt Nix, the same guy who brings us Burn Notice. Although this is a bit of a different show as it is more in the buddy cop vein, whereas Burn Notice is more spy vs spy. You get the occasional laugh from Burn Notice, but overall, it’s a bit more of a serious show, it’s a lot of fun, but not really in the ‘comedy’ sense. The Good Guys is definitely out for the laughs.
Bradley Whitford and Colin Hanks are the stars of the show, playing Detectives Dan Stark and Jack Bailey respectively. Dan Stark and Jack Bailey… pretty basic straight-forward detective names. One of them is more by the book and the other breaks all the rules… pretty straight-forward roles. They open each show with the climax of the episode and then flash back to how we got here, again, pretty standard fare here. Long story short, The Good Guys is nothing you haven’t seen before, it’s all been done a million times before, but it’s done well enough, and with enough funny stuff thrown in that it’s worth the ride.If you choose to sit down and watch this show from the beginning, I have to warn you, it starts a bit slow. I didn’t really get into the first episode, after watching it I was ready to move on to something else. To be fair, I stopped in the middle for about 30 minutes because I got a phone call, but I’ve seen this same reaction in quite a few places online. But the second episode is definitely worth the ‘wait’. I laughed pretty hard a number of times when Detective Stark was yelling at his computer as he tried to figure out how to use it. I also got a good laugh during the third episode when the two detectives were rushing up to the roof and Detective Stark attempted to kick in the door.
As is obvious from my quick notes, a lot of the high points of this show revolve around Bradley Whitford’s portrayal of Stark. Whitford is one of the only people on this show that really had a ‘name’ going into it. Colin Hanks is Tom Hanks’ son (and may I add, a number of times I found myself thinking how much he acts and sounds like his dad!) but he hasn’t really done much to make a name of his own yet. As is the case with all buddy cop shows, the humorous situations only work because Hanks plays off of Whitford’s humor so well.
