While films love to cross-pollinate police procedural with odd-couple bromance, satire with sentimental morality tale, The Good Guys may be television's first buddy-cop dramedy.
Jack Bailey (Colin Hanks) and Dan Stark (Bradely Whitford) are Dallas detectives assigned to property crimes and each other.
If this sounds like a punishment, it is.
Wound tight and by the book, Bailey has alienated his superiors with his snarky schoolmarm ways, while Stark prides himself on being "old school", which means he looks and acts as if he received his police training directly from Starsky and Hutch.
Having once been half of Stark and Savage - a police team so famous the duo had a television movie made about them - Stark is now such a has-been that he lives in a trailer, drinks on duty, wears aviator shades and has a cheesy moustache.
Oh, and he sleeps around. (Because women, even those played by Nia Vardalos, are totally turned on by drunken, moustached, aviator-shaded men.) Stark is also the fastidious Bailey's nightmare made flesh, and since Hanks, a fine and increasingly versatile actor, bears such a striking resemblance in mien and manner to his old man, Tom Hanks, it is difficult not to think of The Good Guys as an updated version of Turner & Hooch, with Whitford playing Hooch.
That may just be intentional.
Because The Good Guys is all about taking the mickey out of out every cop show and film that has preceded it.
Every gun-dependent narrative - the spaghetti Western, 24, Lethal Weapon, you name it - is tagged, and everyone involved, especially Hanks and Whitford, appear to be having the time of their lives.
Their delight is infectious, and The Good Guys' biggest strength is its unflagging sense of fun. And if Whitford can manage to make aviator frames cool again, well, I do believe the man's work is done here.
- The Good Guys screens Thursdays at 8.30pm on FOUR.
