Summary
On Call is a new kind of cop drama, blending serialized drama with a procedural, and while not all of it works, the result is mostly lean, mean entertainment.
Dick Wolf’s contributions to the network TV procedural are undeniable, but streaming is a first for the veteran producer, and On Call represents not just a shift in platform but a shift in style. The eight-part series, exclusive to Prime Video, blurs the lines between procedural and serialized binge-watch fare, condensing the usual structure into taut 24-minute episodes that ping-pong between standalone stories and an overarching narrative. It somehow manages to work holistically, despite some teething issues.
Wolf’s savvy is all over this, though. It’s a police drama at its heart complete with all the usual trappings but some modern stylization, so the drama unfolds with the help of hand-held, bodycam, dash-cam, and CCTV footage, periodically switching to first-person so the viewer can look down the barrel of the action. The cinema verité approach is highly involving, giving relatively played-out scenarios a jolt of new energy.
But the core is recognizable. Following veteran Long Beach Police Department training officer Traci Harmon (Troian Bellisario – Clara) and rookie trainee Alex Diaz (Brandon Larracuente) as they respond to call-outs on patrol, there’s a lot of familiar stuff here, from the cases themselves to the underlying themes and challenges of policework; interfacing with the community, staying within moral and ethical lines, dealing with the emotional fallout, and so on, and so forth.
Despite an abundance of individual cases that function as little capsule stories, sometimes playing with different genres – there’s a pretty funny outcome to a case in the third episode, and a deeply horrifying one in the fifth – On Call is given its overall shape by the murder of another LBPD officer, Maria Delgado, which occurs in the premiere. Delgado, one of Harmon’s former trainees, is senselessly gunned down by a couple of gang members, and the fallout from that event bleeds into every subsequent episode, with the department conducting a more official investigation into the shooting while Harmon carries out a personal one.
This, I think, is what leads to the show’s most pernicious problem, which is that it sometimes feels like the worst of both a serialized drama and a procedural. In the latter, the overarching season plot is teased out gradually in the margins of each episode, while the case-of-the-week stuff occupies the bulk. Given the scant runtimes of the episodes here, that doesn’t quite work, so the main plot feels like the focus, and the procedural deviations feel like distractions. Most of the isolated cases are enjoyable on their own terms, but as the stakes heighten, it can feel frustrating to be consistently be pulled away on another call.
But this is a minor issue. For the most part On Call manages to pack a surprising amount of drama into such a lean package, and it raises interesting policing predicaments that characters disagree over without having to resort to preachy moralizing. An excellent supporting cast helps things along, including Eriq La Salle as Harmon’s counterpoint, Sergeant Lasman, and Rich Ting – late of Tulsa King – as her former mentor.
There’s also plenty of scope here for a second season, which you have to imagine is in the back of Dick Wolf’s mind (has he ever made just a single season of anything?) This freshman outing doesn’t end on a cliffhanger per se, but it preserves the core concept so that it can be returned to in the event of the show proving popular. Something tells me that it very well might.
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