After re-airing the first season that appeared on NBC, TNT will air the next six episodes beginning tonight at 10pm. Anyone checking this?

http://tv.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/arts/television/02southland.html?_r=1&ref=arts

Television Review
Southland
March 2, 2010
Patrolling for Felons and Kudos on Sun-Blinded Streets
By MIKE HALE
Published: March 2, 2010

There’s no other series on television now quite like the TNT cop drama “Southland,” for better and for worse. No show advertises its desire to be taken seriously — its bid for instant-classic status — as insistently as this visually austere account of the daily lives of Los Angeles patrol officers and detectives.


That intention is telegraphed right away in the sepia-toned opening-credits montage, with its images of the Los Angeles River and of Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. “Southland” wants to be seen alongside Chandler and Ellroy, “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” as part of the Southern California-noir pantheon.

That didn’t matter to NBC, which abruptly canceled the show in October before its second season had even begun. The series drew good reviews but middling-to-poor ratings, dropping as low as 4.6 million total viewers, during a seven-episode trial run last spring. It had the potential to radiate prestige — to be the type of production that network suits like to be associated with — but it wasn’t drawing viewers in. And NBC had devoted its 10 p.m. time slot, the show’s natural home, to Jay Leno.

Into the breach stepped the cable channel TNT, which doesn’t need to attract as many viewers as the broadcast networks do. It reran the seven first-season episodes (the premiere in January drew two million people) and beginning Tuesday will show six new episodes that were completed before NBC pulled the plug. No announcement has been made about the show’s future beyond those six; once again, “Southland” finds itself auditioning.

The show has always played a classic double game: it takes the “realistic,” nonsensational, 9-to-5 approach to police work while bringing in as much action, violence and sex around the edges as possible. Episodes begin with chaotic spectacles — the aftermath of a shooting, a car rolling and exploding during a high-speed chase — and then become long flashbacks. If you sit through the quotidian detail of the cops’ days, you’ll get to see the car blow up again.

At the same time, long-range plot strands are woven in, showing up as passing touches from week to week until they suddenly pay off, reflecting an abundance of thought in the show’s writing and planning. In the first season occasional glimpses of the angry neighbors of Russell Clarke, the detective played by Tom Everett Scott, suddenly culminated in Clarke’s being shot on their doorstep, a cliffhanger that’s resolved in Tuesday night’s episode.

Suddenly but not unexpectedly: the signs were obvious enough that we knew what was coming the moment Clarke told his wife that he was going to check on the people next door. That heavy-handedness, in various manifestations, has been the show’s main problem. It marred the otherwise excellent pilot episode when the veteran officer played by Michael Cudlitz kept giving his new partner, played by Ben McKenzie, sententious lectures about the nature of police work that stopped the story in its tracks.

But the solemnities of the writing are balanced by some excellent performances and superior production values. The hand-held camera work and jittery editing are reminiscent of “The Shield,” though “Southland” emphasizes a daytime, sun-struck Los Angeles rather than the nocturnal city that FX series favored.

Mr. Cudlitz, best known as Bull Randleman in “Band of Brothers,” is excellent as Cooper, an honest cop with a bad back who abuses painkillers, and the relationship between Cooper and his young partner, Sherman (Mr. McKenzie), is at the heart of the show.

Both roles are flimsy constructs — Cooper a bundle of working-class resentments, Sherman a trust-fund baby from a broken home — but Mr. Cudlitz is able to build a character from angry glowers and sarcastic remarks, while Mr. McKenzie, in his first big part since “The OC,” is a revelation. Freed up by a role in which he spends a lot of his time chasing and tackling suspects, he’s loose and natural — suddenly an actor.

The Cooper-Sherman squad-car dynamic is so good that you wish that the show didn’t devote so much time to the detectives, some of whom are played well —Shawn Hatosy stands out — but whose story lines are less interesting. (A first-season arc about the efforts of Mr. Hatosy’s Detective Bryant to protect a young witness was an exception.) The fun lies with the foot soldiers, including Arija Bareikis, who’s appealing as a stoic, frustrated female officer.

The temptation is strong to overrate “Southland,” to give it credit for its good intentions, even when they lead directly to its problems. It’s a worthy show, but to stand next to obvious inspirations like “The Shield” and especially “NYPD Blue” (for which Ann Biderman, the show’s creator, wrote scripts), it needs to learn a lesson from them and give space to its pulpy, low-brow side.

SOUTHLAND

TNT, Tuesday nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.

Created by Ann Biderman; directed by Christopher Chulack; Ms. Biderman, Mr. Chulack and John Wells, executive producers. Produced by John Wells Productions in association with Warner Brothers Television.

WITH: Michael Cudlitz (John Cooper), Ben McKenzie (Ben Sherman) Arija Bareikis (Chickie Brown), Regina King (Lydia Adams), Tom Everett Scott (Russell Clarke) and Shawn Hatosy (Sammy Bryant).