'Battle Creek' Premiere Review: Should It Be Better Than It Is?

A show “from the creators of House and Breaking Bad,” is how CBS is promoting Battle Creek, and thus expectations are set rather high. Which is too bad, because this new CBS cop show works best when you don’t expect it to do more than solve a crime in a mildly amusing manner. Had you not been told upfront that producers David Shore and Vince Gilligan were behind this little enterprise, you probably wouldn’t have sensed the involvement of their sensibilities.

Josh Duhamel stars as an FBI agent who has been reassigned to Battle Creek, Michigan, much to the surprise of the police force there, especially Dean Winters, as the cop who’s partnered with him. Winters’s Russ Agnew, jaded and cynical, keeps wondering why a smooth customer like Duhamel’s Milt Chamberlain is in Battle Creek. A handsome agent who doesn’t mind letting you know he’s played golf with President Obama, Chamberlain must have done something bad to be assigned to Battle Creek — “a step down,” Agnew notes, “from Boise.”

Chamberlain’s backstory runs beneath some plots that are ordinary cop-show fare (a stabbed-to-death waitress, for instance) and archly unusual stuff (the second episode is all about breaking up a maple-syrup cartel).

Duhamel and Winters do good work as guys who rub each other the wrong way. House’s Kal Penn is prominent among the group of Battle Creek’s mediocre-level police department, which is headed up by Tony Award-winning, two-time Oscar nominee Janet McTeer in a gruff-police-commander role that could have been lifted directly from a TNT series like Major Crimes or The Closer.

At its best, Battle Creek reaches for the witty whimsy of another out-of-the-way-location CBS series such as Northern Exposure. But most of the time, Battle Creek just seems like an only slightly jauntier police procedural than the ones that overrun network TV.

Battle Creek airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on CBS.