The new Fox police drama K-Ville premiered last night at 9 EDT. It’s a fairly standard cop show, and the presumed angle of interest is that it’s set in post-Katrina New Orleans. The show indicates that the city is still a mess and that the people there are highly disturbed, some by trauma and some just because many of the good people moved out and have yet to return, while the dregs remained.

The premiere episode included a good deal of the usual boohooing we hear about New Orleans, how nobody cares about it, yadayadayada. Of course, like the others in the media who complain about this and claim it’s a product of racism, the show’s producers and characters fail to see the irony in their complaints being aired while we never hear anybody griping about desperate needs in Mississippi and Alabama and in other areas of Louisiana that were hit hard by the storm. Oh, well, consistency is a hobgoblin, isn’t it?

In addition to this whining undertone, K-Ville includes all the standard anxieties and personal problems necessary for the  central characters of a good policier these days. This convention is becoming increasingly boring, I must say. In addition to all this weepy personal drama, K-Ville has some jerkily photographed action scenes meant to pep things up, and they do accomplish that, if only through the negative means of momentarily reducing the amount of whining by the central characters.

What is quite good about K-Ville is the actors playing the central characters. Anthony Anderson is always appealing, and Cole Hauser makes an excellent partner, as his stolidness and mysterious attitude make a good contrast with Anderson’s skittishness and emotionality. Now if only they’d leave their personal problems at home and concentrate on catching crooks. It’s enough to make one want to watch reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard . . .