‘The Good Guys’ is Finished for the Summer

“The Good Guys,” a comedy/action/cop series by Burn Notice‘s Matt Nix, has concluded its summer run. The good news is that the show will return in the fall. The bad news is that Fox is putting it in the Friday Night Death slot.

Mores the pity, because, while “The Good Guys” is a formula show, it is a fun formula. The one complaint is that the characters of Dan Stark and Jack Bailey don’t seem to grow and change all that much from episode to episode.

The basic “The Good Guys” episode has our heroes investigating some minor crime, such as a break-in or vandalism, and, one thing leading to another, our intrepid super cops suddenly become involved in something major. For instance, in the last episode of the summer, “Don’t Tase Me Bro,” Stark and Bailey investigate a bicycle theft. The combination of a misadventure with a taser gun and the use of YouTube lead them to a former bookie in the witness protection program being menaced by a hit man who lives with his mom and a female federal marshal from hell (except when she is from heaven.)

Then there is the time shifting. Some plot twists happen. Then, we see 20 minutes or five seconds or seven years earlier, the incident that led to it.

Jack’s continuing puppy-dog obsession with his ex-girl-friend, prosecutor Liz Traynor, is starting to get old. Hopefully, during the show’s fall run, they will finally get a room.

The focus of “The Good Guys” remains Dan Stark, the 1980s rogue cop gone to seed. He lives in an old trailer, much like Mel Gibson’s Riggs from “The Lethal Weapon” series. He is clueless about technology beyond his service weapon and his fists, which is always getting him into trouble. Yet, Dan’s street smarts have not deserted him, despite years of alcohol abuse.

There are, happily, new aspects to Dan’s character that keep cropping up. In “Silvio’s Way,” the episode about the wannabe-goombas, Dan proves himself a rare method actor when he goes undercover. When he infiltrates the gang of Italian hoods, he goes into full Tony Soprano mode, with the bowling shirt, the accent (“forgeddaboutit!”), and the swaggering attitude. And he never stops, even when his Lieutenant screams at him to.

The other thing fascinating about Dan Stark is his way with women. He is pudgy, out of shape, and with pick up lines that our such howlers that one wonders whether a female orangutan would fall for it. But somehow the combination of oily charm and middle aged action bravura allows him to bed women that men half his age (like Jack Bailey) just stammer over. Even the federal marshal, a woman so wound up that she makes the marshal in “In Plain Sight” seem zen-like calm, eventually yields to his advances.

What is the man’s secret? That alone makes “The Good Guys” worth watching.

Source:

The Good Guys, Epguides.com