TV: K-Ville (Fox, Monday 9/8)

Marlin Boulet (Anthony Anderson) is the veteran cop, determined to do what he can to help New Orleans recover, but hovering on the edge of a nervous breakdown from his own post-Katrina stress. Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser) is new to the force, a by-the-book, ex-military man with secrets and demons of his own. They make up the show's odd-couple team, and unfortunately, neither of them is an interesting enough actor to carry a leading role. Individually and together, they're on the dull side, with so little personality that it was all I could do to stay awake even during the noisy car chases and gunfights.

There are other cops, but the pilot episode is busy establishing these two characters; one assumes that Tawny Cypress and Blake Shields will be given a bit more to do in future episodes. Making the best impression in the pilot is John Carroll Lynch as the captain of the squad. It's a graceful, relaxed performance; Lynch provides a calm, easy authority without the bellowing that we so often get in this type of role. (I was reminded a bit of J.K. Simmons from The Closer, who brings a similar low-key charm to the same type of character.)

The show itself is a bland police procedural; there will be a crime each week, and Boulet and Cobb will tie up all the loose ends by minute 58. The only thing that might be distinctive about the show is its setting, post-Katrina New Orleans, but K-Ville offers us little more than a Dixieland band and a few mentions of gumbo to place us there. If you're going to use the national tragedy of our era as the backdrop for a TV show, I think you have an obligation to dig a bit deeper than that.

I'm skeptical that K-Ville has found the proper form in which to tell New Orleans' story. An episodic police show is, by definition, a show in which none of the main characters grow, change, learn, or have any real emotional response to anything. Oh, a cop may get misty-eyed over a tragic death or scream at a thug, but that's resolved by the end of the hour as the Magic Reset Button is hit.

The story of New Orleans needs to be told in a way that allows emotional involvement (for characters and audience alike), with characters who have room to breathe and become fully three-dimensional. New Orleans needs someone who can do for it what David Chase did for the Jersey mob in The Sopranos, what David Simon does for Baltimore in The Wire. New Orleans needs a poet, and there's not a lick of poetry in K-Ville.