K-Ville: The Big Not-So-Easy

Today marks two years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, devastating the city of New Orleans. And in those two years, TV has done its part to acknowledge and remember what happened in the Big Easy and its aftermath, from documentaries, both Spike Lee- and Discovery-helmed, to special episodes of shows like Dirty Jobs and Law & Order: SVU, to Anderson Cooper, Keeping Them Honest as he does, and even plot points on failed shows like Runaway and Studio 60. Now Fox is bringing us K-Ville, an entire show about life in New Orleans post-Katrina, and it's the sort of show that makes you wish that it would last a while, to keep the focus on the rebuilding efforts. That is, the idea makes you wish it would last a while. The execution leaves something to be desired, as I discovered when I watched the pilot on Fox.com.

The writing is often heavy-handed, with one character more or less getting the words "REDEMPTION ARC" tattooed across his forehead, and another character hiding a Dark Secret that seems to primarily exist as an incentive to keep people watching. However, much of the ham-fistedness is focused in the character of Marlin Boulet, played by Anthony Anderson, who in recent years has almost entirely redeemed himself for Kangaroo Jack. Boulet is a dedicated cop fighting to rebuild his city, and particularly his hood, the Ninth Ward. They're admirable sentiments that unfortunately take the form of speechifying, and they don't always work, especially his paean to the cypress tree early on in the episode. (Of course, I freely admit that one of my pet peeves is laymen using the scientific name of something for no reason, as Boulet does.) However, K-Ville does prove that it can successfully marry the activist and cop elements of the show, by showing us how much Boulet knows and loves his hood, and how hard he tries to protect it. That, I think, is the line K-Ville should be walking.

That said, there is promise. The show does well getting across the flavor of New Orleans, as diluted by Katrina as it is. Boulet gets interesting when he drinks on the job and gets into tricky negotiations with his wife about moving back home with their daughter. Boulet's partner, Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser), is the character who is Not What He Seems, and, perhaps because of that mystery, and contrasted against the fact that Boulet is pretty much an open book, he's the more compelling of the two. While I wasn't particularly impressed with the reveal of the Dark Secret, I won't deny that it makes for a potentially rich backstory.

But it's only the pilot, and I've only ever seen a couple of stellar pilots. The second episode is always the true test of what a show is going to be, and so, because I really want to like this show, I'll wait until I see that before I make any judgment. But that doesn't mean that you can't make your own snap judgment by watching the pilot here.