Some reviews of the second season of Southland

The Washington Post:

Every few years, television takes a giant step forward, perhaps partly to compensate for all those other steps backward. One dependable area of improvement is the cop show.

“Southland,” set in Los Angeles, is the next great cop show and the next big step — a major improvement over the status quo in content and style.

The key character through which we experience much of the mayhem is novice officer Ben Sherman, played by Ben McKenzie, a young actor probably most familiar from his lead role on that murky-quirky Fox series “The O.C.,” a glossy soap also set in California’s “southland.” McKenzie has fortunately matured as an actor, and although the character he plays is implosive rather than demonstrative, he shows considerably greater range than he did before. You can sense that this kid could go either way — become a great cop or throw up his hands and quit.

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Newsday:

MY SAY: No point in pouring acid into NBC’s gaping and self-inflicted “It’s 10 p.m.: Do you know where your dramas are?” wound, but it did have a fine new show with “Southland” which it did cancel after a criminally short run. So let’s concentrate on the positive. TNT had the brains to pick up this excellent cop drama, and now you and some devoted fans are the beneficiaries.

BOTTOM LINE: Here’s to a long and fruitful run in the new home. Tuesday night proves exactly why “Southland” deserves one.

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Boston Herald

This is the series NBC passed on for useless months of Jay Leno. Of all the boneheaded decisions committed by the peacock network over the last year, taking the ax to the John Wells (“ER”) cop drama “Southland” might surpass them all.
The second season beginning tonight on TNT – which consists, alas, of only the six episodes filmed before NBC pulled the plug – finds a gritty series deepening its storytelling.

Patrolmen John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz) and Ben Sherman (Ben McKenzie, a universe away from his days on “The O.C.”) simmer in each other’s presence.

Not perhaps since “Hill Street Blues” (coincidentally, another NBC show, one that was given time to find its audience) has there been a cop drama that felt so authentic.

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The NY times:

The Cooper-Sherman squad-car dynamic is so good that you wish that the show didn’t devote so much time to the detectives, some of whom are played well —Shawn Hatosy stands out — but whose story lines are less interesting. (A first-season arc about the efforts of Mr. Hatosy’s Detective Bryant to protect a young witness was an exception.) The fun lies with the foot soldiers, including Arija Bareikis, who’s appealing as a stoic, frustrated female officer.

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The LA Times:

it is dark and gritty, but that’s only to say that the show — created by Ann Biderman, who also wrote the recent Michael Mann film “Public Enemies” — is less stylish in its look, more natural in its talk, and less fanciful in its gruesomeness than most other cop shows now airing.

what “Southland” does best is to portray police work as a job — boring, trying, exciting by turns. And, partly by taking advantage of the technologies of reality TV, “Southland” does especially well at putting you inside the action — chases, mob scenes, shootouts, are unusually kinetic and suspenseful and felt for a television show.

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TV Guide Magazine

The first of six new episodes airs this week (on the heels of TNT’s replay of the seven that aired last spring), and it wisely focuses on the show’s strongest assets: the prickly mentor-rookie relationship of patrol cops John Cooper (the excellent Michael Cudlitz), who’s addicted to black-market prescription drugs for a bad back, and Ben Sherman (Ben McKenzie, a world away from O.C. angst), the newbie trying to escape the embarrassing baggage of being a rich kid riding the mean streets.

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New York Daily News:

most of the characters are likable, even the flawed ones and even though the ensemble may be two or three characters too big for us to get a handle on everyone.

The potential is there, though, and so far it’s most clearly developed in the complex relationship between Officer John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz) and rookie cop Ben Sherman (Ben McKenzie).

Cooper is a 20-year vet, a crusty old-timer who thinks the nicest thing you can do for rookies is to toughen ‘em up, and if they don’t like it, well, they weren’t meant to be cops anyhow.

He doesn’t hold out a lot of hope for Sherman, who comes from the privileged world of Beverly Hills and at first glance seems to have few instincts for any street rougher than Rodeo Drive.

Gradually, though, the show gives Sherman more steel and reveals Cooper’s addiction to pain pills, which works to level the field between them.

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EW.com

The tremendously exciting second-season premiere — the first of six new episodes — plunges us into numerous L.A.-cop story lines, the best of which finds Regina King’s Lydia dealing with a cocky new partner (Amaury Nolasco). Ben McKenzie has become the show’s quiet but powerful center, while the sexism subplot involving Officer Chickie Brown (Arija Bareikis) may prove one of Southland’s most intriguing. NBC: How foolish you were to let this show go — you had your next ER, your next Hill Street Blues. TNT: You’re lucky to have such a commanding series. A-

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For even more reviews look at “Metacritic.com” Score for Southland

March 02, 2010 | Media Alerts, Southland, TV News & Reviews | 0 Comments | Browse Archives