Brow Beat

Vince Gilligan’s New Cop Show Looks Like a Retread of Many Other Cop Shows

Dean Winters and Josh Duhamel in Battle Creek.

Still from YouTube

Late last year, when the final episodes of Breaking Bad were breaking brains and ratings records across the nation, Vince Gilligan announced two new shows. One was Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spinoff. The other, and less anticipated of the two, was Battle Creek, which is based on a script Gilligan wrote 10 years ago. Now Creek has a trailer, and it looks like a solid but derivative entry in the saturated cop drama field.

The show explores the unlikely partnership between naïve, “good-at-everything” FBI agent Milton Chamberlain (Josh Duhamel) and hard-nosed local detective Russ Agnew (Dean Winters). As usual, lessons are learned on both sides, with the “good cop, bad cop” dynamic being mined for social commentary. It all looks and sounds like a show that was written 10 years ago, but Gilligan and day-to-day showrunner David Shore (of House fame) deserve the benefit of the doubt. Battle Creek premieres March 1.