By Brandon Nolta
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, the old saw goes, and this week’s look into K-VILLE, Fox’s post-Katrina New Orleans drama, illustrates the point quite effectively. Things open up as Officer Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser) knocks over an abandoned fridge, and pulls out a huge wad of cash from the back. He then cleans up the money and gives it to a pretty young woman, who turns out to be the wife of Cobb’s former cellmate. Sounds real nice, doesn’t it? It was, too, right up until the cash turns out to be marked bills from a bank robbery. Oops.
Our other hero, Officer Marlin Boulet (Anthony Anderson), has his mind on other things at the moment. His old partner, Charlie Pratt (Derek Webster), the one who abandoned Boulet in the days immediately after the hurricane, is applying to get back on the force, and has asked his old buddy Marlin to be a character witness. Boulet is understandably conflicted about this, since he hasn’t yet been able to forgive Charlie for abandoning his post. Throw in a woman murdered in a way that seems to implicate voodoo who turns out to have a secret past, and it’s another day full of violence and fun in the Big Easy.
I say it every week, but what the hell, I’ll say it again a little plainer: K-VILLE’s a damn good show. I look forward to seeing Anderson and Hauser go head-to-head every Monday night; there are better shows available on the boob tube right now, but there aren’t any better partnerships being featured than this one. Boulet and Cobb are perfect complements, but they don’t seem willing to settle in just yet, and their burgeoning relationship as partners and friends is one of the show’s most potent themes (the rise and fall of New Orleans being the other).
As always, both lead actors bring their A-games; these two are so good, in fact, that they crowd everyone else off the screen. Cypress and Shields are filling in their roles slowly, since they don’t get a lot of screen time, and Lynch is always fun, but there’s no doubt who owns this show. The writers are well aware of this, and spend their narrative time exploring the interplay between Boulet and Cobb, so much so that it feels like the cases they tackle every week exist to give them something new to talk about.
Plus, their back stories actually give them depth and texture, as opposed to simply providing them a few behavioral traits to be exploited by the plot. Cobb’s past in particular as a convicted criminal—a past that only he and Boulet know about—gives their relationship an underlying tension that helps keep them from falling into the casual give and take that defines the cliché of police partnership. While the New Orleans subplots are well worth the time (and make K-VILLE unlike any other procedural in their own right), it’s the work of Anderson and Hauser that make the show one of the bright spots of Monday night TV. As pointed out before, it’s on Fox, though, so get it while it’s good.