I can't imagine that this was Kathryn Bigelow's intention, but I'm sure I'm not the only lady out there who started paying more attention to Jeremy Renner after watching The Hurt Locker. Snub nose, a total lack of fear, a refusal to let a kid's body be turned into a weapon, and lack of social skills in normal environments? Intriguing! Fortunately, the episodes of Renner's recently-cancelled ABC show, The Unusuals, are floating around the internet, so I spent part of the weekend having myself a look.
Renner plays Walsh, a cranky and secretive cop who used to play first base for the Yankees, and makes his entrance in the first episode of the show cooking pork chops with a reduction of Skittles for a Sikh who's wandered into the infrequently-open diner Walsh owns, operates extremely poorly, and lives behind. He gets a new partner, the always enjoyable Amber Tamblyn, who has become a cop against the wishes of her wealthy family. The other two sets of partners include Harold Perrineau (whom I adore) as a cop who is so terrified he'll die at 42 that he wears his bullet-proof vest everywhere, and Adam Goldberg, who has a brain tumor he refuses to treat, and somehow can't die, even when he falls in front of a subway train or gets shot at by a suspect; and a sarcastic Latina detective who is given very little to do except sleep with Renner's character and be paired with a clumsily ambitious knockoff of Ron Burgundy who refers to himself in the third person.
It's not, as that description makes clear, a normal cop show. There are rare moments, unfortunately mostly played by Renner, where the characters play it straight, and those are the most boring parts of the show. The best parts of the show are the truly weird ones, like when a famously disorganized New York crime family kicks off a spree by leaving their trademark onion in a pawn shop they've robbed, and proceed to complain vociferously about the NYPD's discrimination against short people. Or the episode where Perrineau and Goldberg discover, on a tip from a one man band they've arrested, an underground store that specializes in murder weapons and books with titles like "How to Dismember a Body" and "So You Want to Kill Your Boss" and decide to run it as a sting operation. There's occasional Buffy-worth dialogue, like when Tamblyn declares "It looks like Mr. Standwood was getting a culinary tour of the South of Pants when the victim was hit," when she and Renner find a picture of a guy who committed a hit-and-run with a prostitute in his car. And the show uses Airplane-like dispatcher announcements to mark scene transitions, a nice touch.
It's too bad The Unusuals isn't being brought back for a second season. It was a fresh, and friendly (a word I don't use often when describing entertainment) take on the cop show, it actually looked like New York, and the crimes were a little bit more low-key. But I think it's telling that I went into the show excited about Jeremy Renner, and got caught up in Tamblyn, Goldberg, and Perrineau instead. If Renner learns anything from The Hurt Locker, it's that he's better when he doesn't try to play normal (after that initial scene, he retreats into a world of bland), and I don't really mean in the Dahmer, or The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things kind of way. Entertainment in general is often better off when people embrace the weird as a path to doing the right thing, instead of as a clear sign of deviance.