Detroit 1-8-7 - "Pilot" and "Local Hero/Overboard"
Detroit 1-8-7 debuts tonight on ABC at 10 p.m. Eastern.
Detroit 1-8-7 is notable less for what it actually is in the pilot and more for the promise it shows. The pilot is less interesting as an episode of television and more interesting as an example of what the show is trying to get back to. If it can overcome some of the sloppier storytelling of the pilot and second episode and if it can continue its focus on characters over cases, this could be this season's The Good Wife, an enjoyable throwback to an '80s and '90s drama type that entertains through simple, solid execution. But where The Good Wife was trying to simply turn into a new L.A. Law or The Practice, Detroit 1-8-7 has its eyes set on much, much bigger game. It wants to be Homicide: Life on the Streets for a new decade, and shows like Homicide: Life on the Streets don't just fall off the truck.
In case the title and references to Homicide weren't a giveaway, Detroit 1-8-7 is yet another cop drama. Yet unlike many of the cop procedurals of the past ten years, this is more of a police station workplace drama. It focuses more on the police officers as characters, getting into their personal lives (or lack thereof) and being less concerned about just who committed the crimes and more concerned about the soul-deadening process of solving them. In the pilot, the cops try to figure out who the killer behind a double homicide in a pharmacy was, while another duo attempts to solve the case of how a man in an expensive suit came to be a corpse in an abandoned train car. Basically, the only thing separating this from its most obvious spiritual forebears – Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, and Hill Street Blues – is the fact that it's set in crumbling Detroit.
The big controversy surrounding Detroit 1-8-7 has been the fact that, well, it's set in Detroit. Some who live in the city have raised the issue that the pilot is vaguely exploitative, simply because the reason it's set in Detroit seems to be the popular (and true) perception that there are a lot of murders in Detroit. In addition, the wreckage of the city's grand past provides the best mid-apocalyptic backdrop for a cop show in ages. There may be something to these complaints. The Detroit setting is not particularly important to the show, beyond the fact that Michigan tax credits made it easier for the show to film several scenes in the pilot there. (It is less clear where the second episode was filmed. Updated: I've learned that only a slight amount of the pilot was filmed in Detroit, but most of the second episode was. So there you go.) It's mostly set in Detroit so that the show can take advantage of just how hard-up the city is. There isn't even a passing and completely gratuitous reference to Bill Laimbeer or something.