The Unusuals - It's not unusual for this to suck so very much.

So far the ABC midseason has brought us misfires like In The Motherhood and Surviving Suburbia, almost fires like Better Off Ted, and full fires (if that’s a thing) like Cupid so we popped The Unusuals on hoping it would be more Cupid than Motherhood. It’s not.

The Unusuals is described as being a ‘comedy drama set in the crazy world of New York City Police detectives’ except that it fails at both the comedy and the drama. It’s a complete mess of a show that doesn’t know what it wants to be and instead tries to be everything it can think of.

The problems begin in the writers room but don’t end until the credits role.

First off: we’re introduced to too many characters in the first episode. A lot of characters is fine, we love big ensembles, but only when those ensembles seem to be working together in not just the same plot but on the same show.

The Unusuals gives us Joan Of Arcadia dressed as a hooker, turns out she’s actually a cop, she’s now hired as a new detective. Her new partner has recently lost his old partner to a homicide. So they go about investigating his death. It’s all serious and mysterious and tough as nails and bullshit. MEANWHILE Black Guy From Lost and Adam Goldberg play a couple of wacky cops investigate cat murders. Apparently “cat murders” is a stand in for “actual comedy” in this show.

We find out that Adam Goldberg wants to die, and Black Guy From Lost is afraid of dying (IRONY PLUS) so Black Guy wears a bullet proof vest all the time, and always makes sure he washes his hands, and doesn’t want to be around a guy with a death wish because he’s afraid of dying ... if this guy was really afraid of dying I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t still be a cop. You can tell the writers didn’t think more than twice about any of these characters. “Ooh his quirk can be he’s afraid of dying. Lol.”

Comedy dramas usually meld the comedy into the drama not have a plot that is the drama plot and a plot that is the comedy plot. When two of your cops are wacky, and the other two stiff as a plank of wood and they’re not interacting it’s just disjointed and pointless.

On top of that the shows pretty horribly miscast. Especially Sisterhood Of The Travelling Pants in the lead role as the new detective. From what I can tell she must have been working Vice as an extra curricular activity at high school before graduating and then becoming a detective. When you spend your life playing high school girls, and you look like a high school girl, nobody is going to buy you as a detective.

This central casting seems to have thrown the rest of the casting out. Because Amber Tamblyn looks young better to cast a youngish looking guy to be her partner – so she’s partnered with Jeremy Renner otherwise known as that guy you think you recognise from something but you can’t figure it out (it’s The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford by the way... either that or 28 Weeks Later, or neither...)

The problem with Jeremy Renner? He seems about 20 years younger than the character he’s playing as well. Apparently this guy used to be a major league baseball player, and then he retired, became a cop, and now also runs a diner. Shouldn’t this guy be like fifty something and not thirty something? Who’s had a pro baseball career and managed to become lead detective in NYC by the time their thirty five?

There’s a spattering of so many cast members that Heroes would be proud – there’s the douchebag cop who wants all the media attention, there’s the Latino lady cop who you can tell has sass because they force it down your throat with every line of dialogue she has, there’s the no bullshit chief of police, there’s the overly Christian cop who I’m pretty sure is Kenneth from 30 Rock’s cousin...

The pilot is all over the shop. It tries way too hard to be cool and just comes off as dickish. In fact that’s the problem with pretty much every last character: they’re all assholes and not in a watchable Denis Leary way.

The big “twist” to the show is that everybody has a secret, but these secrets are so well kept that we know half of them by the time the first episode ends. They try to play up the ‘what’s his secret’ mystery with the ex-pro ball playing diner owning cop, but it comes across as half assed at best, in a tacked on ‘Life’ kind of way.

ABC describes The Unusuals as being a “modern day MASH” ... yeah, if MASH was shit.

Good, Average, Bad or Ugly?
Bad