Very early review of Cop House (FOX)

First off, thank you to the dude that twitted me (for absolutely no reason) that Rachael Harris is married and out of my league anyway, it made me laugh. Let's talk about Cop House a new FOX comedy written by Adam Resnick, a former SNL writer. It's one of the shows that seem to be getting a good buzz and the all-star cast is probably helping. Rachael Harris, Tony Hale, Nick Kroll (from Cavemen, do you remember that one? I know some people who were part of green-lighting what will probably be remembered as one of the worst shows of the decade), Scott Caan, JoAnna Garcia (from the maybe-not-cancelled Privileged) and Curtiss Cook (who is going to be big soon).



Cop House is following a few police officers that have been suspended for random reasons like posing for Hustler or Stress Disorder and they now have to support their eccentric personalities into a rehabilitation center for useless cops.

I'm pretty sure about how Adam Resnick works : he has a few good jokes, two okay one-liners, a nice opener, and believes he can build something around it. Unfortunately, it's not how it works and with a build-up like this one, you most of the times end-up with story-lines going from weak to nonexistent.

Cop House is taking itself too seriously and is forgetting to be funny. It hasn't figured out if it wants to be a drama or a comedy, or both and while I was reading, all I could think about was if we would actually get see Rachael Harris posing for Hustler. You can't use a pilot as a trial, it's not the place to see what kind of humor you do best, or if you can make people cry and unfortunately, Resnick doesn't have a clue about his own writing.

As much as I like the opening, I don't believe in readiness, a character should be complex and elaborate, therefore, presenting ten of your characters in a thirty second scene shows immediate lack of composite (the rest of the pilot wasn't any better).

Both arcs from the pilot were absolutely uninteresting. The first one was about Tony loosing his mug and suspecting one of the guys for the disappearing and the second one was about making a choice between going to a sports game or a pistol competition. Seriously, how ridiculous did that sound? We should do the same thing into an Elementary school, it might actually work better (sending a memo to FOX, now).

All in all, I can't see this making a TV show, much less a good one and I can only hope FOX see passed the good casting before green-lighting this.