Wednesday, May 19, 2010

The Good Guys: I am now a devoted viewer

Just because they kept their word about Stark living "in a trailer in the shadow of the Texas Star." Really. He lives in FairPark, beside the Merry-Go-Round, right where the midway ends.

It's funny how the show's creator Matt Nix talks about Dallas: "'This is a throwback to the classic cop shows, and Dallas has the look of those shows. I kept saying to people, "If we shoot this in the suburbs, it'll look wrong. We need power cables."'"

Funny, because so many Dallas city leaders feel just the opposite. They probably would prefer the Good Guys to be shot exclusively in front of shiny new places. Not brick storefronts. Not the 70-year-old State Fair site that's home to the Cotton Bowl but not the Cotton Bowl game. Maybe Nix can give us a new appreciation for the older, less sparkly parts of town.

Also funny: The Good Guys' Stark is a cop whose greatest career achievement happened in the 80s -- about the time the TV show Dallas was at its height. About the time Robocop made Dallas City Hall look so bold and futuristic.

Anyway, I liked the show well enough. I certainly hope it's not a failure.

6 comments:

Zelda Rose said...

It's a silly cartoon of a show. Hanks is channeling his dad's "Turner and Hooch" persona; Whitford works the porn 'stache. If you spend even a millisecond taking anything that happens seriously, the show falls apart. If you let go and think of it as the live action bastard child of Animaniacs and Starsky and Hutch you'll do fine...

The best bits? The Second-Best Assasin in the World. The drug mule who's pissed off about staying in crappy hotels and renting cheap cars and thinks becoming Eric Estrada will work. The gun battle between the Second Best and the Best Assassin that would do credit to Tarantino.

So, I'll watch it again as long as it keeps this silliness going. If it comes close to going serious? Bye...

Irene Done said...

That's a really good sum-up of the show. I liked Good Guys but I do wonder about its ability to, episode after episode, strike just the right balance/tone. In the mean time, it's fun to see FairPark as a backdrop.

The DA's accent though almost ruined everything.

Zelda Rose said...

Supposedly the show does get better. There's a nice write-up in this month's D Magazine. And picking out the locations is fun. I do think the trailer in Fair Park is a bit too Lethal Weapon/Rockford Files...

And they really need to fix the DA's accent-what the heck was that?

Irene Done said...

Ha! The Rockford Files! Exactly!

Zelda Rose said...

More I think about it, there's some serious Rockford Files influences here. The trailer (but no beach), the Firebird, the seventies wardrobe...

Irene Done said...

I think you're right. And now all this talk of 70s crime shows is making me want to watch Police Woman. OMG Sgt. Pepper Anderson!