Why The Anxiety Over The Good Guys?

There's been some online chatter in Angela Lee's Film Austin Yahoo Group in response to a recent piece about The Good Guys that ran in "Texas Monthly" (subscription required).

I've been thinking about The Good Guys too, and wrote about it a bit in a recent TV Eye. I have two responses about what I've read about the "issue" so far:

First: The series is shot in Dallas. The end. It has NOTHING to do with Dallas, Texas, or Texans. It's a campy comedy which pokes fun at the police genre (circa 1970s) and especially the image of the seasoned cop with a past – in this case, a washed-up cop played by Bradley Whitford (The West Wing), who is stuck in his 1970s glory days. He's hilarious, by the way. Watch his performance. It's all the stuff he does around the scenes that kill, his delivery, his timing. And Colin Hanks is a competent straight man who I believe will only get better with time.

Yes, The Good Guys relies on the well worn premise of opposites having to work together (introduced by Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, which was an inversion of those screwball comedies from his youth, which was beget from … ?) To put it succinctly, so?

From my perspective, the hand-wringing over The Good Guys is misdirected. It is what it is, folks. It's not the best thing I've seen on TV, but it's certainly not the worst. And the fact that it appears on Fox is not a useful salvo. Fox has long paid its dues to become one of the big four (formerly, the big three) broadcast TV networks. Like all the rest, it has its good (House – which I can't stand but others love; Glee, Fringe, Human Target, and the now defunct 24); its bad (Til Death), and its WTF?! (Cops, the still sputtering Sons of Tucson)

Second: This question of the "real" Texas fascinates me, especially since I've never see my experience of Texas depicted on TV. Ever. It's a subject I plan to address later in the year when other Texas-shot TV series are released.