Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: apb, entertainment, Ernie Hudson, fox, justin kirk, natalie martinez, television

APB Could Be More Than A Police Procedural

This article contains spoilers for the pilot episode of APB – Hard Reset.

.

.

.

.

.

.

The premise for the new Fox series APB got my attention early on. A rich inventor named Gideon Reeves (He was Gideon Reed up until tonight it seems) is played by Justin Kirk and is basically Tony Stark. When he stops in a bad neighborhood to pick up a cigarette after a big presentation, his best friend is killed in a hold up and Gideon is put on hold while calling 911. After six weeks of the police being too busy laying off cops to investigate his friends murder, Reeves steps in and forces the Mayor's office to grant him permission to upgrade and run the 13th precinct.

At the 13th precinct we have two familiar faces Ernie Hudson who plays Sgt. Ed Conrad and Kevin Chapman as Cpt Hauser. But the main cop in this is Amelia Murphy played by Natalie Martinez, a 10 year vet and single mom. She should've been a detective by now but isn't… no reason given. She is skeptical of Gideon and his technology but gives it a shot and the two are able to find the suspect and arrest him. Pretty straight forward story. Except this isn't a movie, its a TV series. What do they do now? Gideon is known for getting bored and moving on to new projects. He promotes Murphy to detective, and the episode ends with the APB app suddenly reporting crimes all over the city, not just the 13th precinct.

The people who put this show together through in so many sci-fi hints that anyone whose a fan of the genre would spend the episode picking up those clues. I won't call them Easter Eggs, more like genre mood setters. The uniforms reminded me of the movie Runaway with Tom Selleck. A cop named Murphy makes me think of Robocop. Gideon's big presentation and his reaction is totally Tony Stark. It's like they want to trigger happy sci-fi memories while you're watching the show… which is a smart way to go.

But what will or won't make this show work is going to come down to the actually crimes and how the new technology or the old cop ways solve them. You can't set up a premise like this then solve mundane crimes each week. I liked the first episode. I liked Gideon and Murphy and I think the show has a good premise. But it's a premise that will need to be serviced and not forgotten or this show becomes just another police procedural and we have plenty of them on the air.

https://youtu.be/ewTb6XYvZ_g

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!