Where the show finds a Yin to Russ’ Yang, and loses its trace bitter flavour almost immediately, is in Milton. Duhamel gets one moment in the pilot where the character is penetrable, psyching himself up for a meet-and-greet so as to show at least a feint hint of vulnerability to the man. Outside of this scene, though, the pilot is dedicated to making Milton less a character than he is a scientifically bred boy scout foil for Russ. Think of any sitcom episode where the new kid comes to town, and totally, affably upstages the hero without even trying, and you’ll understand the punchline that constitutes 75% of the humor in Battle Creek’s pilot.
The first case the two work seems intentionally half-baked, designed specifically to setup moments where Russ and Milton disagree on tactics, only to have Milton’s modern techniques and charm (“if you prick him, does he not bleed?” he says of a street dealer Russ threatens) win out. What begins as a rebuttal to the glamorous excess of CSI becomes an uneasy adaptation of it, with Milton’s access to scrub teams, judges, and F.B.I. software serving largely to make Russ the butt of his own pessimism. It’s a good cop/bad cop routine in which there’s no good reason to side with the bad cop.
In a way, the overall breeziness of Battle Creek is maybe the riskiest thing about it. The laughably earnest climax doesn’t present a choice between Russ and Chamberlain’s beliefs, so much as it resigns the former to being a sideline heckler and outlet for our own skepticism. By the end of the pilot, a potential underdog cop comedy has morphed fully into Homicide: Life on Sesame Street, with Russ playing Bert to Milton’s Ernie.
How Battle Creek will reconcile its tone with typical police drama plotting will be its toughest trick to pull off. As Russ mentions in the pilot, Battle Creek only has a population of 50,000, so depending on the kind of crime being investigated, the show’s sunny disposition could swing from naïve to sociopathic if mishandled. Yet, it’s easy to envision a version of the show that could make for a perfectly agreeable, low-impact romp not too far down the road. Though given little more than character names in the first hour, there’s a strong supporting cast on deck to spice up the bickering of Winters and Duhamel that will no doubt come to be Battle Creek’s bread and butter (the promise of Patton Oswalt as the town’s mayor is certainly encouraging).
Whether Battle Creek will end up finding an audience on CBS is hard to tell at this initial stage, as it’s as much a snug fit for their brand as it is an outlier. Given a few more expletives and a sky blue background, it could be mistaken for a USA show, Duhamel looking like he was pulled out of the same primordial ooze of handsomeness that birthed the cast of Suits. It’s as light on original ideas as it is on its feet, which alone makes it a more immediately approachable option than something like Fox’s grim Batman Babies, or the umpteenth serial killer drama CBS itself has to offer. Battle Creek seems content at this point to dust off an old rulebook, rather than risk playing by any of its own, but its trifling nature makes it go down smoother than many of the truly pessimistic crime dramas TV is already riddled with.
