"Cops have rules. We have limits."
This is a spoiler-free advance review for CBS's new drama Training Day, which premieres on February 2nd at 10 p.m. ET/PT.
CBS's new drama Training Day may take the name of Antoine Fuqua's 2001 crime thriller, but it's lost all the grittiness of the film's look at the dark underbelly of a corrupt Los Angeles. Here, the challenging dynamic between the two cops on different ends of the moral spectrum is distilled and simplified for the small screen, resulting in a familiar police procedural that loses sight of what made the original so engaging. Though interestingly, even though it's offering new riffs on the same character archetypes, it's worth nothing this is supposed to take place in the same universe as Fuqua's Training Day film.
While not playing the same character, Bill Paxton symbolically takes on the Denzel Washington role as Detective Frank Rourke, a veteran cop who will frequently do bad things for the sake of the greater good. Sometimes that means letting the most wanted man in America go for the sake of bagging the criminal of the week; while Training Day's synopsis tags Frank as a corrupt cop, his self-described "rogue" status is more accurate. Meanwhile Justin Cornwall is there in place of Ethan Hawke's rookie officer as Kyle Craig, who gets tapped by his boss to go undercover as Frank's partner in order to catch him up to no good.
But there's more connecting the two than Kyle's secret agenda: Kyle's father Billy, a police officer who was killed in action, was also a good friend and colleague of Frank's. When they learn there was more to Billy's death than they initially thought, Kyle gets pulled into Frank's Special Investigation Section squad (played by Arrow's Katrina Law as Det. Rebecca Lee and Drew Van Acker as Tommy Campbell) in order to find out the truth of his father's demise. Because of that, he becomes more of an ally to Frank than a watchdog, despite Frank frequently breaking the rules to get the win at the end of the day.
As much as Kyle is the point of entry into the TV series, Paxton's Frank is far and away the lead. Paxton hams it up the right amount, but also knows when to rein it in to ground the character. From the opening narration to the connection Frank seems to with every victim he's doing the wrong thing for, it's Paxton's performance that is the driving momentum of the show.
This version of Training Day was developed by Fuqua and Jerry Bruckheimer, but the three episodes I've seen lack any of the bite or statement of the 2001 film. While the movie offered challenging moral questions, here Frank's moral ambiguousness leaves little doubt that he is the good guy. There have been plenty enough other TV procedurals that show a lead doing the wrong thing for the right reasons that the case-of-the-week crime format in this show doesn't feel especially fresh. If the Training Day TV show does intend on eventually skewing Frank closer to the significantly darker and more antagonistic Det. Alonzo Harris from the movie, it shows no sign of it now.
That being said, CBS's Training Day is a very safe new procedural for the network to add to its cache. This is an easy show to watch. The villains of the week are easy to spot and often cartoony, the dark underbelly of Los Angeles is fairly generic when compared to the corrupt cities shown on TV, and the series has plenty of fun keeping the characters' personal stakes as high as the professional ones. There's a throughline mystery of what happened to Kyle's father and an axe hanging over the character's head as to how long he'll be able to cover for Frank -- and how long until Frank finds out about his secret orders from their superior.
Training Day's playful tone offers it more longevity; Paxton's character couldn't be as morally challenged as Washington's, because then there would be no extended story. It's much easier to package the corrupt cop and his rookie partner together as a team instead of opponents, but because of that this adaptation of Training Day loses a lot of its impact.
The Verdict
Training Day is simplified for the small screen in this new drama from Antoine Fuqua and Jerry Bruckheimer. Not as morally challenging or gritty as its big screen predecessor, the new CBS TV show feels like a familiar take on the police procedural genre.
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