Lori Loughlin’s First Major Acting Role Since Her Scandal Is Rough

At first, the new Prime Video crime series On Call might appear in desperate need of street-level credibility.

This beat-cop show, delivered in brisk sub-30-minute installments, follows experienced Traci Harmon (Troian Bellisario) and her latest rookie protege Alex Diaz (Brandon Larracuente) through various day-to-day streets-of-Long-Beach encounters, while Traci also attempts to track down the criminals who shot one of her former trainees. (That’s the show’s exploitatively grabby opening scene.) The series clearly strives to feel like a timely form of the cop drama, with references to police brutality and frequent cutaways to body-cam footage integrated into the action.

It also tries to juice that action with the perception that cops are both selflessly heroic and placed in near-constant danger from streets teeming with the criminal element. It’s all a bit strenuous, even sweaty.

Luckily, just when all of these exertions start to feel phony, the show plays its ace: a supporting performance from Lori Loughlin as a flinty veteran police lieutenant. She’s only on screen for a few minutes at a time, but whenever she appears, Loughlin radiates rough-hewn authenticity. After all, who better to play a tough cop than a genuine hardened criminal?

Just kidding. Not about Loughlin appearing in the show, which is a bafflingly real thing, or about Loughlin’s actual conviction or time served in prison for fraud in a college-admissions scandal; no, kidding about her being good or well-suited to this role in any way. In every one of her limited scenes, she performs with a clenched, distracting stiffness. At times she seems unsure of how to even sit or stand naturally. Gravitas does not come easily to her, a fact that becomes especially egregious because the show’s other higher-up cop is played by ER’s Eriq LaSalle—who, as if testifying to his easy way with authority, also directs several of the first season’s eight episodes.

Despite her unconvincing performance, Loughlin isn’t ultimately the main problem with On Call, a new addition to the Dick Wolf world of crime shows. She’s just the strangest symptom of the show’s terminal posing. With its short running times and frequent (which is to say repetitive) foot chases that treat policing as a kind of ongoing horror video game, the show often looks like it’s attempting to serve as a narrative update of the long-running propaganda docuseries Cops.

Creators Tim Walsh and Elliot Wolf (yes, son of the boss) have produced a series that tries for punchiness with its short episodes, but feels more parceled out in the manner of an old web series, with all the depth that implies. The pseudo-vérité style is by turns haphazard (those random body-cam cuts) and accidentally hilarious (snap zooms that are always hilariously timed to dramatic moments in a way the creators don’t seem to realize is more closely associated with sitcoms like The Office).

Even in terms of undemanding crime fiction, On Call falters. Bellisario and Larracuente make likable enough leads, and if they don’t paint particularly vivid or memorable portraits of young street cops, they also can’t help but feel more genuine when placed next to Lieutenant Lori Loughlin. But the episode-to-episode calls the cops answer, while appealingly varied, often delve into a grimness the show feels ill-equipped to handle (or, worse, turn into spectacle).

Is it instructive to include a little vignette where an officer must mournfully shoot a mortally injured dog who can’t be saved by the hours-away animal control officers? Shouldn’t a scene like that, or another one where a young girl is rescued from her father’s deranged attempts to give her an exorcism, attempt to do more than wring cheap emotional involvement from lurid subjects?

It’s clear that On Call wants to pay tribute to the complexity of this profession, without falling victim to either pure copaganda or abolish-the-police sermonizing. But the changes it makes from familiar formulas are almost insultingly cosmetic, and the serialized portion of its storyline is soapy and cartoonish. This isn’t a revitalization of the cop show; it’s just a faster method of delivery. Maybe next time, start with Loughlin playing the criminal and go from there.