Previewing Terriers

Remember back in the early nineties when MTV was such a cultural phenomenon even their commercials could launch a career (of course now they cannot even launch a musical act). Now all those commercial stars are convening on FX with their own television shows, Denis Leary is in his last season on Rescue Me. Tonight Donal Logue, also known as Jimmy the Cab Driver, gets his own show Terriers.

The show follows Logue as he travels between two worlds, his old life and his new one. In his old life, he was a cop with a by the book partner in Rockmond Dunbar (who conspicuously looks like a thinner Rockefeller Butts complete with an oral fixation) while in his new life he can barely get by as a private investigator with a former petty thief for a partner as played by Michael-Raymond James (who conspicuously looks like a younger Eddie Finnerty). In his former life, he was married to Kimberly Quinn (Two and a Half Men) but now he is resigned to buying the house they lived, and got divorced in despite the lack of a steady cash flow.

Things seem start to pick up for the PI duo while looking for a friend’s daughter who just so happens to works for a developer who gives the guys a retainer to get back “sensitive material” that she took. And yes, the sensitive material is what you think, but much more. Despite a conclusion at the end of the episode, I do not expect this storyline to go away even though the next couple episodes deal exclusively with case of the week plots with an occasional mention of what happens in the first episode. And the third episode features maybe the most bizarre cliffhanger ever (be sure to pay attention to the upper right part of the screen).

Though the best new show of the fall, be warned Terriers is not as funny as the promos would have you to believe and is more of the tone FX’s other freshman series, Justified. But Raylan Gibbons these guys aren’t. Logue’s jokes are more of a rundown bitter man who quips bitterly when asked questions he does not want to answer than his usual punch line fare of his sitcom work. And despite the title, the dog of choice is for some reason is a bulldog. It is still unknown to me why the show is called Terriers. But the show gets bonus points for the cheeky seventyish title sequence.

Terriers airs Wednesdays at 10:00 on FX. There is a Terriers page on Hulu so presumably episodes will show up there eventually.