"Who the hell do you think you are?" an officious superior officer asks Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Bill Hollister (Stephen Dorff) in the opening scene of Deputy. "I'm a lawman," Bill answers, and with his standard attire of flannel shirts, jeans, cowboy boots, and a toothpick in his mouth, Bill is obviously meant to evoke the lawmen of vintage Westerns. He even echoes one of the iconic lines from Western classic Tombstone, telling his bosses "I'm your huckleberry" when it comes to catching criminals.
Bill's old-fashioned moral code (he refuses to cooperate with ICE raids, but has no problem roughing up "bad guys") is about to get him bounced from the department, until the sheriff dies of a heart attack and city officials dig up a 170-year-old law that says that when the sheriff dies in office, his longest-serving deputy is appointed in his place until the next election. Bill is suddenly sworn in as the new top cop of Los Angeles County, and he's not going to let this unexpected opportunity go to waste.
The set-up is, of course, ridiculous, positioning Bill as sort of the King Ralph of law enforcement -- Bill himself compares the whole thing to a Brady Bunch episode -- and creator Will Beall (a former LAPD detective who also co-wrote Aquaman) uses it as an excuse for police wish fulfillment, as Bill cuts through red tape to go after gang members, drug runners and armed robbers, while the same stiff, rules-obsessed supervisor who grilled him in the opening scene sputters ineffectively in the background. Bill is practically a parody of macho bluster, complaining about "not enough ass-kickers" in the department and threatening suspects with lines like "Badge or no badge, I'll always come after scum like you."
The individual cases in the three episodes available for review are entirely forgettable, and because Bill isn't meant to be out in the field now that he's sheriff, each case has to contrive a personal connection that places him on the front lines. That conceit is already stretched pretty thin over three episodes, so it's difficult to imagine it effectively playing out for an entire season, let alone multiple seasons. Beall fills out the supporting cast with a handful of other deputies, including Bill's no-nonsense assistant Breanna Bishop (Bex Taylor-Klaus), the grizzled Cade Walker (Brian Van Holt, sporting an epic beard), the bland Charlie Minnick (Danielle Moné Truitt), and the rookie Joseph Blair (Shane Paul McGhie), son of Bill's slain former partner, making the show resemble a more traditional ensemble police procedural in its structure.
All of the deputies get their own uninteresting subplots about their personal lives, and even Bill's bureaucratic nemesis, Undersheriff Jerry Londone (Mark Moses), has an arc about his wife filing for divorce. It's hard to care about what any of these people do in their off time, however, because they're barely established as characters before being thrust into heightened melodrama. Bill isn't much more clearly defined, with the creators seemingly intending him to fill whatever political mold viewers might prefer to project.
He stands up to ICE, even shutting down a raid minutes before it's set to happen, and talks down a mentally disturbed murder suspect in defiance of his trigger-happy deputies. But he also routinely violates procedure and, at one point, is cited as one of the deputies with the most use-of-force complaints. He's progressive or conservative, open-minded or intransigent, from scene to scene and episode to episode. Former pretty boy Dorff has aged into the "wise, weathered veteran" phase of his career, and he plays Bill with the kind of rasp and perpetual three-day stubble that suggests a poor man's Kiefer Sutherland.
Bill has a teenage daughter with only a handful of lines over three episodes, and his wife Julia Reyes (Yara Martinez) is an emergency-room physician who appears to be the only doctor in Los Angeles County, treating Bill, his deputies and even random suspects. Outside of the hospital, she's a generically supportive wife, backing the choices Bill makes even if they place his career at risk (he only has a little more than 100 days before the election and his potential demotion). Bill is the kind of guy who takes one look at his notes for a meeting before tearing them up, and moves all of his hardened deputies into the administrative offices so that he can shake up the staid middle managers working to undermine him.
Bill is such a cartoonish tough guy that he's impossible to take seriously, and the show might as well be set in a fantasy world for its simplistic portrayal of law enforcement and the value of cops who allegedly get things done. Filmmaker David Ayer directs the first two episodes with the same blunt, brutish energy he's brought to his numerous cop dramas, including Harsh Times, Street Kings, End of Watch and Sabotage, although Bill is the kind of absurd archetype who probably would have fit just as well in Ayer's version of Suicide Squad. Call him Lawman.
Starring Stephen Dorff, Brian Van Holt, Bex Taylor-Klaus, Yara Martinez, Shane Paul McGhie, Danielle Moné Truitt and Mark Moses, Deputy premieres Thursday on Fox at 9 p.m. ET/PT.