Stream It Or Skip It?

Dick Wolf’s production company has been giving us shows about cops and other law enforcement for over 30 years, but their latest cop show is a little different than what we’ve seen from them in the past. First, it’s about patrol cops; second, the episodes are jam-packed half-hours. Third, there is an overall story arc to the season. Does it feel new or just the same old thing?

ON CALL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A police SUV driving through the streets of Long Beach, California.

The Gist: Officer Maria Delgado (Monica Raymund) stops a car driven by a gang member she’s busted before. In the passenger seat is a teenage girl that looks like she’s been drugged. But she’s most suspicious of the gangbanger in the back seat. She had a right to worry; she draws her gun as he draws his and gets a bullet in the neck for her trouble.

As the LBPD mourns Delgado’s death, the search is on for the shooter. Training officer Traci Harmon (Troian Bellisario) was hit especially hard by Delgado’s death, as she was Delgado’s training officer a few years back. Her boss, Lt. Bishop (Lori Loughlin), briefs the officers about the shooter still being at large and to not engage if they spot him; there is a task force that will be called in. She also sees if Harmon OK to take on a new trainee, Alex Diaz (Brandon Larracuente), who has already seemed to bond with Sgt. Lasman (Eriq LaSalle), an old-school patrol cop whose methods are not what she likes to teach her trainees.

Hamon gives Diaz a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card from Monopoly, telling him that every trainee has needed to use it at some point. She finds out that Diaz is the first cop from a family that are not fans of the police, which he says “motivates me” to achieve.

On his first shift, though, he makes mistakes, like accidentally recording Harmon threatening a domestic violence suspect on his body cam. But he also engages in a way a raw rookie usually doesn’t, like when he encourages a meth-addicted driver they pulled over to call his dad and say he needs help. But when they chase a car that supposedly has Delgado’s killer inside, Diaz goes off and chases him through abandoned houses with no backup or communication with Harmon, which puts the training officer squarely in Lt. Bishop’s crosshairs.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Despite being produced by Dick Wolf (the show was created by Tim Walsh and Elliot Wolf, with LaSalle as an EP and director), On Call feels less like Law & Order and more like a modern take on a series from a prolific producer of the past, Jack Webb’s Adam-12.

Our Take: In a lot of ways, On Call is a standard cop drama, but at times it plays out almost like a scripted version of Cops or Live PD. Walsh and Wolf, as well as LaSalle, know that policing in 2025 is more complex than ever. The old methods, the ones supported by old-school cops like Lasman, are no longer in use; in fact, those methods can get an officer disciplined, fired or jailed. But there are also more eyes on what they do than ever before, as they often roll up on scenes where people are recording what they do on their phones, waiting to see some sort of misconduct to blast out on social media.

So, with the now-ubiquitous jittery handheld camera footage and more traditional angles, Wolf, Walsh and LaSalle (as well as the show’s other director, Brenna Malloy), incorporate footage from the standpoint of the officer’s bodycams, complete with a time/date stamp that identifies which officer it came from. There’s a good reason for this, as bodycams have been adopted by police departments nationwide as a way to not only protect their officers against accusations of misconduct, but to hold them to account when misconduct actually happens. It may seem like a distracting gimmick, but it’s a reality of policing today, and it’s a welcome addition.

Thre episodes are only about a half-hour, but a lot of action is packed into those episodes, and while Harmon and Diaz are going to respond to various calls together — in the second episode, they join other patrol cops at a tent city where the head and hand of a gangbanger is found, for instance — the overall story of the search for Delgado’s killer will consume the entire season, as will Diaz’s growing distrust of Harmon.

We already see evidence of the latter story in how Diaz responds to advice from Lasman in Episode 2, but there is also the idea that, in the aftermath of Delgado’s murder, that Harmon may be questioning her training methods to begin with.

Because of the short length of the episodes, they’re packed with action and relatively short periods of throat-clearing exposition and dialogue. However, we get enough info about Harmon and Diaz to know where each of them are coming from in this story, which is more than enough in this format.

Sex and Skin: None in the first two episodes.

Parting Shot: After his screw-up after chasing the shooter alone, Diaz tries to give Harmon the Get Out Of Jail Free card. She says to keep it, and get his head straight. “We’ve still got a half a shift to go.” They then respond to another call.

Sleeper Star: For some reason, watching Lori Loughlin spit f-bombs as Lt. Bishop tickles us to no end and feels very satisfying. Who knew she had it in her?

Most Pilot-y Line: When a call comes in on the in-car laptop, Harmon says, “Let’s stimulate our minds.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. On Call has a nice pace to it, and the performances of Bellisario and Larracuente are understated and effective. Sure, it’s a police procedural, but at least its format and subject matter are a little different than what we normally see.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.