“Ryan Caulfield: Year One” Tomorrow at 8 on WNYW/Ch.5
FOX’S teen-cop drama started out as “Ryan Caulfield.” Then it became “The Badland.” Now it debuts as “Ryan Caulfield: Year One.” As if there were a chance of “Year Two.”
“Ryan” is DOA.
It’s a bomb about a 19-year-old Philly lunk (Sean Maher) who gets a gun, a uniform, a badge and a sophomoric voiceover that belabors the good, the bad and the ugly givens about being a naive cop in a tough neighborhood, where you get caught in crossfire one minute and puked on by a naked fat drunk the next.
“It’s not like you see in the movies,” says Ryan.
Actually, it is like you see in too many movies, but bad movies are finite torture.
“Ryan” is all about going on and on and on and on about everything from the weight of his badge (“much heavier than you’d think”) to how hard it is to tell whether a naked, fat drunk is “farting or snoring; you can’t tell which.”
Maybe Ryan needs a remedial course in which of his senses is being assaulted.
It’s for sure the producers – the same guys who gave us “The Negotiator” and who slap a poster on Ryan’s bedroom wall to remind us of that claim to box-office fame – could stand a remedial course in dramatic logic.
There is none in “Ryan,” which tries to make a dead-serious world revolve around a kid who has little more than a Dick Tracy jawline going for him.
So all the adults become wildly overdrawn supporting characters – from the partner who has a Mary Katherine Gallagher fascination with his body odors to the station brass who instantly demand that he play basketball (for favors from gangbangers) or poker (for no apparent reason) with them.
Puhleeeeeeeze. This is a guy who still lives with his mother (Brenda Bakke, who plays the role more downtrodden than Mary McDonnell, who flirted with her TV son all the way through the original pilot).
Ryan also lives with the spectre of his father, who’s apparently in the slammer on a murder charge.
So Ryan wants to set everything right – on the job, where he’s partnered with Michael Rispoli (who’s getting better material as the comatose cop on NBC’s “Third Watch”), and in his personal life, which so desperately aspires to being compared to “Good Will Hunting.”
Ryan turned down a college scholarship to become a cop and hang out with pals who give grunge, slackers, underage binge drinking and Punxsutawney Phil a bad name.
The fright-haired Vic (James Roday) is a porn-addicted gas-station clerk. The already balding “H” (Chad Lindberg) is a plumber’s helper in the family business.
A typical night finds these guys cruising, getting blotto, calling each other by girls’ names, debating the “quintessential Keanu,” and making Vic explain the puns in porn titles.
Yeah, like we couldn’t get the “jokes” in “NYPD Blew” and “Four Beddings and a Urinal” without the help of a rookie cop who says it’s “cool” that he had to get 21 stitches in his forehead after losing his gun to a perp; a Christian Slater wannabe who gets so turned on at lunch with his buds that he announces “Punxatawny Phil has come up to check the weather,” and a kid who’s a few dozen chromosomes shy of a full load.
But “Ryan” is nothing if not heavy-handed and empty-headed.
Tonight, Ryan’s got a girlfriend who does ice shots at a frat party and then dons a formal the next night for a sorority party.
Next week, the girlfriend’s nowhere to be found and Ryan is in full ogle at the slightly older Latina cop (Roselyn Sanchez) who tonight strips to her undies in the unisex locker room and next week hikes her evening gown to reveal a gun holstered to a shapely thigh. But she’s only complaining about how hard it is to walk in high heels.
We’re supposed to long for the moment these two will assume the prone position.
But if Ryan is the same sort of lover that he is cop, he’ll make the wrong moves too fast.
Someone needs to call 911 and report that Fox’s entire Friday night lineup is being held hostage.