I like Nathan Fillion. I enjoyed the short lived Firefly and loved Castle (well, the first seven seasons anyway) and always enjoyed seeing him in guest appearances on shows like Brooklyn 99 or Modern Family, but when I heard he had a new regular show coming out, I had no strong desire to watch it. The commercials made it look kind of gimmicky and just the same old, same old in police procedurals.

I was playing with the Fire TV unit I bought on boxing day and tried out the CTV Go app (I may write an article just on that annoying and lazily put together piece of code) and picked The Rookie from the list of shows available. I’m not sure why, I guess I just wanted something I had not already watched and as I said, I like Nathan Fillion.

I’m glad I did. I really like this show. The premise is about a forty something, recently divorced man who leaves his old career in construction behind and moves to Los Angeles to start over as a police officer, becoming the oldest rookie cop on the force. His fellow newbies are played by Melissa O’Neil (guess we won’t be getting a Dark Matter revival now) and Titus Makin

I’m only up to episode seven, but they tricked me in the pilot. Everyone is presented as classic trope characters, The Angry Sergeant, The No Nonsense Captain, The Over Achieving Rookie, The Ball Busting Training Officer, but slowly over the course of the episodes those stereotypes get peeled away to revel the layers of real people underneath, and I like that. The characters are all believable, relatable, human. Despite Nathan Fillion being the big name attached, it feels much more like an ensemble show, and while the commercials made it seem like a procedural, it plays as a soap opera. No outrageous storylines (yet), but also no big crime shown at the beginning that gets neatly wrapped up at the end. The series is much more about the lives of these law enforcement officers on and off the job. It feels more like the early seasons of Greys Anatomy, with cops instead of doctors.

From what I’ve read the show is doing well in a traditionally bad time slot for ABC and has already had the second half of it’s season picked up for a full twenty episodes. I hope they keep the characters and stories grounded and I hope they reign in the number of ‘Dad Speeches’ they have Fillions character making. I also hope they start wearing bullet proof vests, because these rookie cops are getting shot at a LOT.