I think in part it's a class issue. Goldblum's character, Zach Nichols, is the son of a Columbia psychiatry professor and his psychiatrist wife. He's estranged from them and dropped out of college to become a cop, but his defenestration from New York's upper-middle class was voluntary, rather than the result of tragedy or loss. Burrows' character has at least a reading knowledge of Urdu and Arabic and spent time in Islamabad as a child. She's not fully sketched in yet, but she's got a fragile, brainy beauty to her.
Together, Nichols and Burrows are intensely cerebral. It's impossible to imagine them heading out to a sad little suburban mental facility to visit an ill mother, or brawling in a New York firehouse and lying about it. They're above it all, and that makes the show a little too clean. A show like that could work, but it's a different beast from Law & Order's Catholic fathers and depressed divorcees, officers who graduated from John Jay rather than Columbia.
The show really feels stiff at this point. I hope it gets looser, but something has to change.