Would "K-Ville" be indulgent in capitalizing on post-Katrina tragedy? Initially, that fear didn't seem legitimate. At the outset, the Fox police drama (Mondays, 9 p.m.), filmed in New Orleans, had a sobriety of purpose that always outstripped its cop-show mechanics. At times, it felt like an exercise in charity more than a shot at small-screen glory.
It remains perhaps the only show on network TV that operates from an assumption of discontent, even rage. In the show's first few episodes, the frustration and sweat of coping with fallout from the storm was palpable. And righteous too, particularly in scenes between Marlin Boulet (Anthony Anderson) and his former partner, Charlie Pratt (Derek Webster), who deserted the police force during Katrina -- "He left me in the water," Boulet said. "He left the city in the water."
That hostility spills over into the show's plotlines, which aren't ripped from the headlines so much as ripped from a white paper done by a government study group. Last week's murder victim was embezzling money from a fund to help those returning after the storm. In early October, one episode's victim was a former district attorney in cahoots with a gang leader, both set to profit from a greenspace initiative.
And Boulet himself is a victim of the storm, his family splintering at the seams. His wife feels he's too consumed by his job, and when she gets his attention, she can only bemoan the hand the city has dealt them.
The moments when Anderson is given room to breathe are the only ones in which "K-Ville" becomes something more than a public service announcement. He's a lyrical actor, equally at ease with indignation and joy. His terrifying 2005 turn on "The Shield" was an "aha!" moment -- on par with Adam Sandler's as something more than an emotional naif in "Punch-Drunk Love" -- and "K-Ville" uses his broad range. "I kept kosher once to impress a girl," he joked in a recent episode, "till she caught me cheating with a pulled pork po'boy."
