There’s a New Cop Show in Town. This One Stars a ‘Gossip Girl.’

There are, at any given moment, approximately one bajillion cop shows airing on American television.

There are funny ones, dramatic ones, funny ones that become dramatic, dramatic ones that become funny, funny-dramatic ones set in New York, or Chicago, or some anonymous Canadian city that can double for New York or Chicago (no offense, Vancouverites). It’s a genre perfect for cable television, a self-sustaining storytelling method that requires nothing from its audience other than to tune in once a week, if that, to understand the basics about the characters and what they do.

It also means that, in our current era of procedural saturation, a show like this is going to have to do a lot to stand out from the rest. The CW’s new procedural comedy Good Cop/Bad Cop attempts to solve this problem by throwing a bunch of stuff at the conspiracy wall and seeing what sticks, to mixed results.

The show, premiering Feb. 19, stars former Gossip Girl Leighton Meester as Lou Hickman, a police detective living in the vaguely Pacific Northwest-coded township of Eden Vale who is clearly too sharp for the small-time crime of her fellow residents, yet enjoys the challenge of working under her gruff yet fair sheriff father Big Hank (Clancy Brown).

That is, until her dad decides to bring in a partner to keep the ambitious Lou grounded, and calls in Henry (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina‘s Luke Cook), Lou’s equally intense and equally smart younger brother. But where Lou relies on her encyclopedia of local connections and people skills, her severe Dexter-meets-Sherlock-meets-Norman Bates brother is often too zealous for his own good. Can these two polar opposites bear to work together???

Obviously, yes, and their copious differences don’t end up amounting to much once the two get rolling on solving cases. It’s more of an excuse to inject some acidity into the relationship, giving the two main characters plenty of opportunities for your requisite cop-show insult banter. Henry’s alienating persona sets Lou’s teeth on edge, and Henry disdains Lou’s small-town folksiness. But when it comes time for them to do their jobs, they pretty handily solve whatever case is at hand.

The cases themselves are fun enough, some pretty gruesome for such a lighthearted show. Murder weapons range from deadly psychoactive mushrooms to taxidermied deer antlers—the kind of stuff one might expect to find in an out-of-the-way locale near the great white wilderness. In that way, the show retains some sense of creativity in an environment that is otherwise full of tropes piled onto more tropes.

That can be fun, and there’s sometimes enough in Good Cop/Bad Cop to set it aside from everything else in its range, but watching the episodes feels, after a little while, more passive than it should. Most of the jokes are forecast long in advance, the playful dialogue between characters feels rote, and the interpersonal relationships are nothing we haven’t seen before. As the show continues, we get glimpses into the side characters’ personas—Lou’s handsome crush is an aspiring fantasy novelist!—but even that kind of stuff often feels like everyone’s just following the directions on the back of the box.

That’s a huge problem in general for most TV, and settling for a Miss Marple/Twin Peaks/Sherlock/Dexter/Northern Exposure hybrid feels inevitable in an industry where everything new is just a version of something that already existed, but Good Cop/Bad Cop is at least a nicer, friendlier way to make it happen.