Hanks, Whitford share chemistry in 'Good Guys'
Matt Nix, the guy who created Fox's new buddy dramedy "The Good Guys," insists he and his colleagues labored over the show's title for weeks, but don't let the generic-sounding handle put you off. This new series, which gets a sneak preview at 8 p.m. Wednesday before beginning its official run on June 7, is a refreshing blast of laughter and almost nonstop action.
A bracing variation on cop buddy comedies, "The Good Guys" combines a sharp visual style with a time-jumping narrative as it follows the adventures of odd-couple Dallas detectives Jack Bailey (Colin Hanks), an ambitious but buttoned-up type who ticked off an important superior, and Dan Stark (Bradley Whitford, "The West Wing"), a boozing 50-something cop blearily trying to recapture his glory days from the 1970s.
Now assigned to work petty theft cases that no one else wants, Jack and Dan nonetheless have an unsettling knack for intersecting with major crimes as they investigate their mind-numbingly dull assignments, leading to frequently explosive faceoffs with some seriously bad criminals.
Also in the cast are Diana Maria Riva as the guys' boss, Lt. Ana Ruiz, and Jenny Wade as Liz Traynor, an assistant prosecutor who is also Jack's ex-girlfriend and current confidante.
It might sound like a familiar formula — and to some extent, it is — but the character-driven comedy is sharp and funny, not to mention delivered skillfully by the two stars, both of whom were eager to escape their usual character types.
"I wanted to get away from the yuppie guys in suits," says Whitford, who was cast as Dan after an NBC sitcom pilot — in which, weirdly enough, he played another alcoholic cop — didn't get picked up. "I hope Dan is unlike any other character I've ever played, and it's so much fun to play this guy. When the show moved to Texas, Dan got a little more Texan. He's not the same guy as in the other (NBC) show, but when you're playing an alcoholic, the research is fascinating, and it's all a write-off," he adds, laughing.
"When I read the pilot for this, I loved that it is aspiring to the really funny characters of 'Raising Arizona,' and there are high stakes, but it's also really funny. It's interesting because it is such a formula that works so well in movies — combining action, crime and comedy — and I think the opportunity for this show is that there are all these really incredible procedural shows on the air now that are just totally irony-deficient. It's fun to put those things together."
Hanks, meanwhile, was getting tired of finding himself repeatedly cast as a nice guy around whom the truly funny stuff actually happened.
"Those were the mainstream roles I was being offered, and that doesn't really give me a chance to be funny," explains Hanks, the 32-year-old son of Oscar winner Tom Hanks. "Really, all you have to do with a part like that is 'bring the sweet' and be endearing. This is much more of a true two-handed setup, with the going back and forth. Jack definitely gets embarrassed by some of Dan's crazy stuff, but Jack talks back, and he talks back with an opinion. I don't have to deliver every line in an uptight, squeaky register, and that's really refreshing."
For both actors, though, this new show marked their first serious foray into the action genre, and both men admit the physical demands of their new show are really taking a toll.
"I was prepared (for the long hours) in that I had been the lead in a few movies, so I sort of knew what it entailed," Hanks says. "What I wasn't prepared for was how that coincided with the more physical rigors of the show. It's one thing when you're in every scene, and you're shooting a fight scene at 2 in the morning. It's another when the stunt you did two days ago suddenly rears its ugly head in a very serious neck cramp just as you are about to film that fight sequence."
At 50, Whitford says he feels the strain more than his younger co-star.
"I am wearing kneepads as we speak," the actor reveals. "I have no ACL (a knee ligament). I lost it somewhere, so I have to wear a leg brace. It's fun to play up that Dan isn't in as good a shape as Jack, but I realized the first week, 'Wow, this is really physical!'"
Nix, who adapted "The Good Guys" from an old, unproduced screenplay, says his still-running USA Network hit "Burn Notice" taught him a lot of narrative tricks and tools he was able to put to good use on this new show, but once again, he wound up with a title that, while making perfect sense, isn't fully able to capture the singular tone of this offbeat show as a whole.
"Finding the title was a nightmare," he sighs. "And it was mainly because the tone of the show is so unusual. A lot of the titles that came up were really cool, but they sounded like we were really doing a cop show, and other shows made it sound like a straight-on sitcom. It's not purely a comedy, and it's not a parody, but neither is it a classic action cop drama.
