HBO Max to try to prestige TV-up the cop show procedural with Milo Ventimiglia and David Ayer

Created and written by Jeremy Carver—whose credits include serving as showrunner on Supernatural during its middle seasons—the show certainly does sound like a slightly more sober take on the modern cop show, casting Ventimiglia as Brian “Milk” Milkovich, who “returns to his hometown of Joliet, Illinois, to rescue a beleaguered police force while seeking redemption of his own.” (Embracing all the qualities available to a male TV cop show protagonist, Milk is described as being both “quietly determined” and “a natural-born leader.”) Deadline notes that the show is being produced on what we refuse to just give in and call “The Pitt blueprint,” i.e., casting a famous guy to star in a show set in a well-trod genre that’s able to put out 15 episodes of TV a year. (“Ah,” we say, sitting down to 9 million re-runs of Tom Selleck’s Blue Bloods: “It’s a Pitt-a-like!”)

Ventimiglia (serving as a co-executive producer) comes to the series after basically a million years on This Is Us, and significantly less on his 2023 crime drama The Company You Keep. Ayer, meanwhile is one of several executive producers on the show. Although he’s done a lot of cop movies over the years—most notably Oscar-winner Training Day, but also End Of Watch, 2003’s S.W.A.T., and, if you want to get loose with definitions, the 2017 Will Smith fantasy police debacle Bright—he’s largely steered clear of TV. (The main exception being directing early episodes of 2020 Fox show Deputy.)