Created by William Finkelstein ('NYPD Blue') and Mike Flynn ('Power Book III: Raising Kanan'), the show stars Amanda Warren as the recently promoted boss of Brooklyn's working-class 74th Precinct.
9:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 2 Amanda Warren, Jimmy Smits, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Kevin Rankin, Richard Kind, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Lavel Schley, Olivia LuccardiEast New York
makes those failings central to its premise. In the premiere, Deputy Inspector Regina Haywood takes up a new post in charge of the 74th Precinct — based in the racially diverse working-class neighborhood that gives the series its title — with a clear-eyed understanding of where the NYPD is falling short, and big ideas about how they can do better.
She encourages her officers to move into the very projects they patrol, bristles against top-down pressure to prioritize cases involving the already privileged, does away with traffic-ticket quotas in an effort to redirect her team’s energy toward the more serious crimes plaguing the neighborhood.
Warren’s Regina, who spends a chunk of the first episode in a red coat that flutters behind her like a superhero’s cape, serves up a mix of righteousness and stubbornness that’s hard to root against — even when she’s pitted against her more pragmatic mentor Suarez, played with appealing gravitas byalum Jimmy Smits.
Amid such company, it’s easy enough to fall back into the well-worn rhythms of the police procedural: of high-stakes cases wrapped up in tidy 40something minute increments, of coworkers affectionately ribbing each other on the job, of montages of soothing competence punctuated by the occasional jolt of violent action.