TV Watch: Say, has anybody been watching this CBS "Golden Boy" thing? (Anybody at all?)

In seven years this very pretty -- yet strangely uninteresting -- boy, who has been on the police force for about ten minutes, is going to be the police commissioner of NYC. Does anybody care?

by Ken

Before I got sidetracked into wondering, in the post title, whether anyone actually is watching this Golden Boy thing (Tuesdays at 10pm ET/PT on CBS), I intended to ask such viewers as might be turned up: Are you making head or tail of it?

So much of it looks like NYC cop shows we've seen over and over and over, except more anonymous. I mean, here is this idyllically pretty boy Clark, who for all his sculptural beauty seems to have no sex appeal whatsoever, who has apparently been on the police force for about ten minutes and is already a detective, and we're told right out of the gate in seven years is going to be the city's police commissioner. And in every episode there are, um, flash-forwards to this mystical "seven years from now" future. Supposedly this is the story of how that happens (are they really expecting the show to last seven years?), but what is the story?

I haven't been able to shake the feeling that the genre here is sci-fi, and it will be revealed that the secret he's harboring is that he's an alien. Or maybe a bionic boy. Or something that explains among other things his connection to a sister who seem to have wandered in from a show about Future Sluts of America. I guess this could be believable, a brother trying to steer his sister away from the wrong path, but it all seems so schematic, so unhuman.

Then there are the cops around young Clark, who also seem to have wandered in, not so much from Central Casting (although there is that) but from Genre Cliché Central. They're all ambitious, and mostly corrupt, and Clark himself seems to have an inclination to the corner-cutting species of corruption. So maybe the story is what kind of cop he turns into who then turns into a pre-teen commissioner?

Amidst all this genre-teasing strangeness there's good old Chi McBride as Clark's partner Don, who everyone else thinks is just a lazy time-server hanging on till pension time, but who is really the old-fashione earnest and honest cop who believes in doing the right thing the right way. I'm not sure McBride is doing that much better an acting job than his castmates. It may just be the relief of watching someone work within a recognizable and identifiable character type.

It may be that I've just been sucked in by the CBS promotion department into thinking that this is supposed to be a Significant Show. But no, when I watched the preview showing of the pilot, I did have a sense that there was something going on here. However, I still don't know what, and even though I still have a bunch of unwatched episodes piled up on my DVR, the show is such heavy going for me that I don't know how quickly I'll be able to find out whether they solve the key mystery for me: what this show thinks it's doing.

Above all I notice that I don't have a lot of enthusiasm, each time I get through an episode, for doing it yet again. Which is why I'm wondering if anyone out there has figured this thing out. Is it worth pursuing?

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