‘On Call’ Review: Dick Wolf’s Prime Video Police Drama Won’t Reinvent the Genre

“On Call” is a decent small-scale police procedural. But is it decent enough when it comes from the house of Dick Wolf?

The pedigreed eight-part show traded broadcast networks for Prime Video, where it will premiere Thursday. The novelty is that each episode is a bite-sized 30 minutes, with modest character arcs that extend over multiple episodes, and multiple seemingly random crime sequences that propel individual installments.

The result feels like “Cops” with a script. The ride-along series puts the audience largely behind the wheel with Traci Harmon (Troian Bellisario, a nepo baby, daughter of Donald P. who also fathered “NCIS,” “Magnum P.I.” and “Quantum Leap”). She’s a divorced surfer with a chip on her shoulder, a junkie sister and a troubled relationship with her fellows on the force. She’s wound as tight as her bun.

Riding shotgun is her trainee, the handsome newbie Alex Diaz (Brandon Larracuente). The young idealist is eager for the challenge, but he keeps leaping into the danger zone, ignoring the sage advice of his seen-too-much mentor/partner. Bullets will fly — but are they necessary?

The show, created under the Wolf umbrella by Dick’s nepo baby Elliot and co-pilot Tim Walsh, has left behind the big cities of New York and Chicago, for the oceanside Long Beach, Ca. It’s an interesting choice because the city south of Los Angeles is a hotbed of haves and have-nots that have little more in common than drug abuse.

In the mansions by the beach, the privileged sons and daughters of the rich party to the death without a sense of mortality. On the gritty Eastern side of town away from the Pacific, gangs circle with first-hand knowledge of slain brothers-and-sisters in arms, and an intense suspicion of the law.

“E.R.” star Eriq La Salle appears in seven of the eight episodes as the supporting character Sarge, Sergeant Lasman. La Salle also directed the pilot and multiple episodes. His direction is adequate but his character never really pops.

Uniformed officers Harmon and Diaz work together under endlessly unnerving circumstances that, in the cop show tradition, their significant others can’t possibly understand. The ultimate fear: death out of the blue. In the pilot, a policewoman makes a routine traffic stop, finding a parolee behind the wheel, an unresponsive young woman in the passenger seat — and in the backseat a jumpy gangmember who we come to learn is nicknamed Maniac. Faster than you can drive through McDonald’s, he shoots the woman in blue in the carotid. Surprised, she falls, blood pumping out of her neck as a group of locals take phone camera pictures and no one steps up to help as the felon’s car screeches off.

This sense of danger — that any routine traffic stop could end in death — on the sunny streets doesn’t let up. Over multiple episodes, the central partners pursue Maniac, shaking up the hornet’s nest that is the local gang scene and riling the bald crime boss Smokey (Lobo Sebastian). Meanwhile, the officers encounter resistance back at the police station where Harmon remains persona non grata after a past incident where she crossed the thin blue line.

While the female-driven series apparently hopes to break the network model and embrace streaming — all eight episodes can easily be consumed with potato chips in a single evening — it doesn’t break new ground. It’s akin to “Dragnet” — nothing but the facts — or the original “Hawaii Five-0” or “Adam-12.”

The real weakness is the characters’ softness and lack of complexity. Harmon hoards her secrets with a perpetually stiff upper lip, which occasionally winces in laughter. The naïve but athletic Diaz. The cipher that is the Sergeant. And Lori Loughlin also returns to series television as a grimace of a lieutenant following her involvement in the Varsity Blues scandal. They all seem like shades of police officers from television shows past.

With a plethora of original “Law & Orders” airing in an addictive nonstop loop, I remain a sucker for the original series pairings. The new “On Call” characters have plenty of runway to make strong impressions, but they pale in comparison to standouts Jerry Orbach, Jesse L. Martin and Dennis Farina, as well as the indelible characters of Kathryn Erbe, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeff Goldblum, Chris Noth, Julianne Nicholson, Saffron Burrows and Annabella Sciorra of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”

The writing, too, is intentionally spare, lacking the wit and barbed one-liners of the older one-hour shows. There are memorable sequences: a mob takeover of an intersection that’s challenging to contain, particularly with civilian cell phones turned on the police to monitor their every move; incidents of domestic violence where the police are summoned only to find themselves in the crossfire of the related combatants; back-alley foot chases with echoes of Kathryn Bigelow’s groundbreaking surfer noir “Point Break” and a shootout at a sleazy motel.

These aren’t particularly bad cops, but they’re not as compelling as they need to be to break through in a flooded marketplace. While the Wolf pack named the series “On Call,” don’t feel the obligation to put it on speed dial.

“On Call” premieres Thursday, Jan. 9 on Prime Video.

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