By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 24, 2025 |
While I tend to avoid the usual procedural fare (NCIS, CSI, FBI, FBI: CSI), I do have an unfortunate soft spot for a few cop shows over the span of the 21st century, specifically Southland and Nathan Fillion’s The Rookie. ACAB notwithstanding, beat cop shows are the law enforcement equivalent of E.R. dramas: fast-paced, chaotic, and usually full of weird cases. Southland embraced gritty, handheld-camera chaos, while The Rookie leans lighter, occasionally funny, and more storyline-driven.
On Call is a Dick Wolf show from creators Elliot Wolf (Dick’s son) and Tim Walsh (Chicago P.D.) that desperately wants to be a hybrid of The Rookie and Southland but instead feels like a pale imitation of both. With ugly cinematography, bad writing, and generic acting, On Call comes off like a Prime Video cop show that graduated from the Netflix school of algorithm-driven slop.
Troian Bellisario stars as veteran training officer Traci Harmon, a by-the-books hardass who takes on a rookie, Alex Diaz (Brandon Larracuente), soon after one of her former trainees is murdered during a routine traffic stop. Harmon channels her anger, sadness, and guilt into being unnecessarily tough on Diaz, but the two eventually bond as their work and personal lives start to intertwine.
Harmon is determined to uncover who killed her rookie, but the investigation puts Diaz’s incarcerated brother in danger when they cross paths with the wrong gang member. On top of that, Harmon has a sister who’s a former cop turned homeless drug addict, because of course she does. Her investigation forces her to go off-book occasionally, all while trying to teach Diaz how to stay on the straight and narrow. Classic cop show stuff.
E.R. star Eriq La Salle directs half the episodes and also plays a veteran cop who may or may not be corrupt, while Lori Loughlin — yes, that Lori Loughlin — plays a brusque lieutenant. She doesn’t do it particularly well, mind you.
There isn’t much positive to say about On Call, except that it is watchable and mercifully short (eight half-hour episodes). But there’s nothing unique or particularly compelling here. It’s serialized Chicago P.D. set in Long Beach, California, and vastly inferior to Prime’s other cop shows in the Bosch universe.
I mean, I still watched it — it’s Dad TV, and as a middle-aged dad, I was demographically obligated — but aside from a solid performance by Bellisario, there’s not much to recommend. Oh, and fun fact: Bellisario is the daughter of Donald P. Bellisario (creator of JAG, NCIS, and Quantum Leap), which makes On Call the most nepo-baby cop show in history. With Dick Wolf’s son as creator and Donald Bellisario’s daughter as the lead, it feels like the TV equivalent of an arranged marriage. If Stephen J. Cannell’s kid had been in the writers’ room, the series might’ve opened a time portal back to the ’80s.