Created by Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad”) and David Shore (“House M.D.”), this quirky police drama is a welcome step in a different direction for CBS, where the cops (and the crimes) usually have preset personalities and the plots hew strictly to format.
Not so in Battle Creek, Mich., (population 51,000), even though “Battle Creek” is in many ways a familiar sort of procedural about a mismatched set of crime-solvers. Gilligan and company have imagined a local police department hamstrung by broken equipment (everything from wonky wiretaps to zapless tasers), where an ambitious but dejected lead detective named Russ Agnew (Dean Winters — you may know him as “Mayhem” from the Allstate ads) keeps begging for more resources.
Help is on the way, Russ’s commander (Janet McTeer) assures him: It comes in the form of FBI agent Milt Chamberlain (Josh Duhamel), a sharp-dressed Dudley Do-Right who has been reassigned from Washington to help clean up crime in … well, in Battle Creek.
Agnew bristles with jealousy as his colleagues and superiors fawn over Chamberlain. Paired together, rivalry gets in their way, with each man acting on entirely different instincts. Judging only the pilot episode, the banter between them can be fun and Gilligan’s influence lends a nice, creepy sheen to the notion that menace lurks anywhere.
