Episode Title: "Pilot"
Writer: Ted Griffin
Director: Craig Brewer
Premise:
Former cop Hank Dolworth (Donal Logue) and his best friend and former crook Britt Pollack (Michael Raymond-James) have formed an unlicensed private investigation firm in the sunlit (and yet noirish) community of Ocean Beach, California. Separately, they're both lost causes. Together, they are too small to fail.
Story:
Inside a truck, Hank and Britt stake out the house of a muscular man before Hank approaches him under the guise of a pool cleaner. Using Hank's deception as a distraction, Britt sneaks into the back of the house and steals the man's dog. Before Hank lets him back into the truck, he asks Britt how much the man's ex-wife is paying them to get her dog back. To his annoyance, he learns that the deal is only for free drycleaning as the muscular man angrily chases after their truck. At breakfast, Hank is tracked down by his ex-wife Gretchen Dolworth (Kimberly Quinn). She lets him know that she's not hitting him up for the alimony he owes her, she's selling the house they lived in. She also passes on a desperate message from Mickey, one of Hank's old drinking buddies.
Upon bailing Mickey out of jail, he explains through tears that his daughter Eleanor called him for help and asked to borrow his gun, which the cops found when they arrested him. Unable to deal with it, Mickey gives the duo some money asks them to look in on her. However, when they visit Eleanor's apartment, they discover that she's been missing for a week. Hank finds a parking citation in Eleanor's room that leads them to the house of a rich developer named Robert Landis (Christopher Cousins). Using the dog they stole earlier as bait to get inside, Hank and Britt speak with Robert directly. Robert admits that Eleanor works for him and says that she took something that belonged to him. He writes the duo a check for $20,000 with the promise of another check in the same amount if they locate her and return what she took.
Hank immediately turns around and uses the money to take his old home off the market, which infuriates both his ex-wife and his partner. Using a stolen police code to help track down Eleanor's cell phone, the duo find it in an abandoned life guard station along with a dead body. They attempt to flee before they can be linked to the crime scene, but their truck is towed. While attempting to reclaim their truck at the impound, Hank's old partner Detective Mark Gustafson (Rockmond Dunbar) questions the duo and tells them that he knows that they were at the beach and that they bailed out Mickey. Mark also says that Eleanor is a suspect in the murder of the guy in the life guard station, but Hank and Britt deny any knowledge of it.
After leaving with their truck, Hank and Britt discover that Eleanor's phone contains a sex video between herself and Robert. Back in his own place, Eleanor confronts Hank at gunpoint and demands her phone back. He quickly disarms her and gets the truth out of her: she and her boyfriend Richard attempted to blackmail Robert with the video file and sent it to him via e-mail to prove that they had it. However, at the end of the clip Robert's private phone conversation reveals that his major development deal is a sham, which is apparently a secret worth killing Richard and Eleanor for.
Hank and Britt take Eleanor to see their lawyer Maggie Lefferts (Jamie Denbo) for advice about the video file. She urges them to lose the tape, as it is too big for them to handle. In the parking garage, Robert's men attack them and try to take Eleanor, but Hank and Britt manage to escape with her. They send her off on a train to go into hiding with a message of thanks to pass on to her father. But Hank and Britt soon discover that Mickey has died of a very suspicious heroin overdose, which sends Hank to the edge of screaming at his old partner to do something about it and investigate Robert. Later, the duo meet up with Robert and give him Eleanor's phone but say that they lost her. He gives them a check for $30,000 dollars, but Hank finally stands up and tells Robert that he will destroy him for having his friend murdered. Hank and Britt leave, but Britt makes sure to mention that he's cashing the check anyway.
That night, Britt sneaks into Robert's mansion and plants the gun that killed Richard in his desk, where Mark and the rest of the police find it the next day while executing a search warrant. Hank and Britt watch with satisfaction as Robert is taken away in handcuffs but Britt notes that the conspiracy they've uncovered will probably lead to more danger; to which Hank replies "ain't we got fun?"
Breakdown:
During our visit to the set of "Terriers," Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James essentially said that the series didn't find its voice until the third or fourth episode. Which is actually a little hard to believe considering how polished the pilot episode is. I went in expecting to see a show that needed a lot of work, but that's not what I saw. Instead, this is a really solid start for a very promising looking series.
It's the chemistry between Logue and Raymond-James that really sets "Terriers" apart. Off the set, these guys are so close that they actually lived together in San Diego while filming the series. And that shows up on the screen, especially when they're alone with each other. They seem more like brothers than really close friends and the connection appears genuine. Even the little quirks they do to annoy each other — like Hank humming old songs to get them stuck in Britt's head or the way that Britt ignores Hank's plea to not answer a phone call from Hank's ex-wife — seem to a deeper friendship than what we normally see on a standard buddy cop show.
The opening theft of the muscular guy's dog was a pretty entertaining introduction to the duo. And that guy actually seemed kind of cool to allow Hank to use his phone, although he apparently screwed over his wife for her furniture and her dog. The dog — which was not a terrier, BTW — actually served as a fairly effective distraction that got them in to see Robert and even paid off again when we saw how Britt parlayed the small favor from the dry cleaner into an expensive night out with his girlfriend.
However, what really won me over were the closing minutes of this episode. How many times have we seen protagonists in film and television threaten their rich adversaries and then be unable to back up their threats? Hank and Britt actually went out and framed Robert for a murder that he was almost certainly responsible for even if he didn't pull the trigger himself. It was also interesting that Robert was less concerned with the sex tape than the fact that his development deals are incredibly shady... if they even exist at all. As Britt indicated at the end, Robert or his partners have already shown a willingness to kill over their secrets and the duo haven't even figured out the full picture of why he was lying about the development deal.
It's also interesting to note that the women in their lives are essentially treating Hank and Britt like they're overgrown kids who never want to become adults. Britt's girlfriend wants him to give her a baby and Hank's ex-wife wants to get him to move on the way she has with another man that she intends to marry. And I have to say, why the hell is she getting alimony from Hank? This dude is dirt poor. Are the marriage laws in California really that messed up?!
Getting back to the story of the episode, it was pretty intricately constructed and the callbacks to the sex tape, the dog, the small favors for Britt and the $1,000 recurring joke from Hank all seemed to fall into place perfectly.
But I think the highest praise I can offer for this series is that I want to see the second episode... right now.
Crave Online Rating: 8.5 out of 10.
