K-Ville Blows It

Am I the only TV viewer who was disappointed with Fox’s K-ville last week?

To me, K-ville was about getting one’s due. Anthony Anderson has had a bunch of solid supporting roles and stole the show as gangster Antwon Mitchell in The Shield. In K-ville, he plays a cop in post hurricane New Orleans.

The show’s creator, Jonathan Lisco, formerly wrote for the popular show NYPD Blue. He had a chance to add some grit to a TV schedule of CSIs and Law and Orders.

Finally, New Orleans itself is a well-known city. It was so even in pre-Katrina days, and is finally getting its airtime as the setting for a major network show.

Still, I was disappointed with the show. The banter was extremely cliché. After his fifth “I’m black and your white, isn’t that funny” joke, I started to feel sorry for Anderson. It was as if the writers thought they could schlock together a script and not worry about quality. Perhaps they expected charity from the viewing audience because the show was set in New Orleans and had so many references to the sorry state of things after Katrina.

The story was pretty much lifted off of every other cop show ever made. Though it seems that the tools to make this a better show are there, it doesn’t look like it will happen for K-ville. The writers are going to have to rely on more than the fact that the film is set in New Orleans to sell their show.

Sure, everyone feels sorry for what happened during Hurricane Katrina. That doesn’t mean that they are going to sit through an hour of bad dialogue and plots recycled from other shows.

Like Katrina, K-ville is another disaster that took place in New Orleans.