‘On Call’ Review: Amazon’s Dick Wolf-Produced Generic Cop-Flavored Background Noise

On one hand, it is certainly damning with faint praise to say that the best thing about On Call is that each episode is only half an hour long. On the other, faint praise is still technically praise, and there are worse things than a show that knows its limits. At no point is the Amazon Prime Video series complex or compelling enough to justify the 44 to 65 minutes you’d typically expect to invest in a police drama.

But enough to pass 22 to 30 minutes? Sure. Why not.

Its premiere, directed by Eriq La Salle (who also executive produces and co-stars), wastes none of those scant minutes. In the first two minutes, a cop (Monica Raymund’s Delgado) is gunned down in the street. Immediately after, a wide-eyed rookie, Diaz (Brandon Larracuente), reports to his first day on the job at the Long Beach Police Department. He’s assigned to training officer Harmon (Troian Bellisario), who we can tell right away is tough but scrupulously fair because she introduces herself by announcing, “I have a low tolerance for people who bitch, but if you make an effort, I can teach you the rest.” Five minutes later — and ten minutes into the series as a whole — the pair are pulling up to their first call together.

From there, episodes split their time between the scattered disturbances that Harmon and Diaz are summoned to via radio, and the serialized pursuit of Delgado’s killer. The former tend to blur into an undifferentiated mass of shitty boyfriends, strung-out addicts and erratic drivers. The latter forges ahead at a steady clip, but with no real surprises — or, really, without enough emotional investment to conjure any expectations to be upended in the first place. Both are shortchanged by writing that exhibits little curiosity about either its main characters or the world they inhabit.

On Call does have a few things going for it (besides those run times). One, at least from a marketing standpoint, is its pedigree — it’s executive produced by Dick Wolf, king of law enforcement and emergency services procedurals, and created by his son Elliot Wolf and Tim Walsh. Another, more substantive asset is its style, which calls to mind narratives like End of Watch in its incorporation of dash cam, body cam and cell phone footage alongside more conventional handheld camerawork. The combination lends the series an almost documentary-like texture that’s otherwise missing from its scripts.

So do the performances, to a point. Bellisario layers subtle notes of empathy, softness and even humor under Harmon’s rigid stoicism. Larracuente is endearing as Diaz, still too green to play it cool; the choice to show him reacting viscerally to the stuff he sees on the job is a graceful touch to emphasize how thrilling or harrowing the work can be. The pair’s chemistry, more collegial than fiery, is solid enough to withstand way too many rounds of Diaz swearing he trusts her completely, and then deciding he doesn’t, and then deciding to trust her again.

But by the end of the eight-episode season, it still feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface of who these people are. Their personalities are painted only in the broadest strokes, and their biographies along the most predictable beats. So we discover that Harmon has an estranged ex-police sister, but get only an abstract sense of how and why she feels complicated about it. We learn that Diaz’s brother is in jail and that his mother hates cops, but not why a kid with that background would nevertheless choose to join the force. Even when the characters are confronted on the job with experiences as gruesome as a severed head or as devastating as a critically injured dog, On Call rarely lingers enough to let us feel the weight of their emotions, let alone explore the messes they leave in their wake.

The supporting players, including Sgt. Lasman (La Salle), drug unit officer Koyama (Rich Ting) and team leader Lt. Bishop (Lori Loughlin), are more sketchily drawn still; their personalities amount to “old school,” “friendly” and “also present.” Long Beach as a milieu is defined by its lack of definition — the city is beaches and suburban avenues and mansions and homeless encampments, all populated by citizens who are always pissed at the cops for either doing too much or not doing enough. It’s painted blandly enough that it could be any American city; that might be an intentional choice to make the story more universal but ultimately just renders it more generic.

Some of that vagueness could reflect a defensiveness about the central subject. Its police characters speak frequently of how closely they’re being scrutinized these days (all those body cams, dash cams and social media feeds underline that point), but carefully avoid going into too much detail as to why the public might be so skeptical of them. There are laments from some of the characters, particularly Lasman, about folks these days being “so woke” that “nobody wants to put shitheads in jail,” but the character the series has chosen as its protagonist, Harmon, is notably “one of the good ones” who tries to play by the rules. She’s generally proven right to have done so, but no one ever seems particularly pleased with her about it.

For all the valorization of courage, the show’s reluctance to tackle harder issues head-on feels rather toothless. But here, again, brevity saves the day. Namely: It’s easier to gloss over that unresolved tension when the pacing is so brisk that there’s no time to think too hard about it.

Or, for that matter, about anything else. On Call’s unwillingness to engage too deeply with anything we’re seeing onscreen makes it hard to ever become totally engrossed by it. But then, not every show wants you to look that closely. Some are content humming along as background noise. If you’re looking for a rich and ambitious exploration of policing in modern America — to quote one of Diaz’s go-to phrases, “this ain’t it.” If all you want is the experience of channel surfing to the middle of a Law & Order episode without worrying that you’re missing too much of the plot, this should suit just fine.