Leary's 'Job' poor at mixing genres

The Job" (9:30 p.m. Wednesday, ABC), starring and produced by Denis Leary: It's not just a cop show and a comedy. It's about balls.\nThe program showed real cajones in its pilot episode by creating a bastard genre from "Police Squad" and "NYPD Blue." But the show's second episode wasn't as ballsy as the pilot. Observe the difference.\nIn the pilot, Leary's character Mike McNeil tells a bike cop, "Your balls are showing. Wait, you're a bike cop, you don't have them."\nIn the second episode, McNeil berates his partner Terrence (Bill Nunn) after his wife comes in and talks to their lieutenant. He urges Terrance, "Get your balls out of her (the wife's) purse, slap them back on and scream bloody murder."\nSee how old the joke got? Leary's humor is muzzled. He pushes the limits a little; then stops. He seems afraid to go on the type of brilliant, piercing tirade that he perfected in his "No Cure For Cancer" routine because he has to be believable as a cop. And therein lies the show's dilemma: What is it? \n"The Job" tries hard to let the audience decide what kind of a show it is: Is it a cop show trying to be funny or an irreverent comedy cloaked in a cop show's trappings? But unless the show can figure out for itself what it is quickly, it will either be too ludicrous for a cop show or too stagnant and stale for a comedy.\nRight now, "The Job" is the best-looking half-hour show on TV, but this might confuse many viewers used to watching sitcoms because "The Job" is formally coded as an hour-long drama, specifically a cop show. \nThe set is three-dimensional, typical of dramas. The lighting is anything but high key. It gives everything a washed-out feeling, like "Hill Street Blues." And the show is shot like a movie: Single camera with a lot of movement on the camera's Z axis -- backward and forward -- instead of the lateral movement common to half-hour shows. There's more lens movement than in Robert Altman's movie "M*A*S*H." \nIf the show were a straight-up parody, the directors might be able to use these cinematic formal techniques to poke fun at "NYPD Blue"'s ludicrously high production values. If it were a cop show, they would give "The Job" an aura of believability. But the show tries to be both genres at once, and the result is it feels like neither.\nSpeaking of trying to do two things at once, Leary himself adds to the show's identity crisis. For much of the show, he plays his character straight. His general pissed-offness comes out rarely, only in brief spurts of unrepentant humor.\nFor example, in one scene in the show's pilot, McNeil tells a prisoner that he's got the guy's grandmother in the next room and that the police are going to kick her ass. This catches the prisoner off guard, but he doesn't buy it until he hears the sounds of his grandma screaming his name in the next room.\nThe police, it turns out, told his grandma that he was dead and tape-recorded her laments. They play it on a boom box and trash the room. Terrence comes in to get McNeil, saying "Grandma is out of control!"\nThe prisoner confesses.\nAlthough the scene made me laugh, it seems way too subdued for Leary. It was like something the detectives might pull on "Law and Order." Where is the moment where Leary is so pissed off that he explodes and goes on an insightful rant, like he did in "Demolition Man"?\nYou know what the only thing more disappointing than "The Job" is? This column. I didn't manage to make one decent joke in the last 636 words. You readers, especially you Dennis Leary fans, should be furious with me!