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In 1989, just a few months after securing his first Oscar nomination for Large, and a few years before achieving near-unparalleled critical and commercial success in film history, Tom Hanks starred in a string of mediocre films that would never have suggested the megastar he had become. One of them was Turner & Hooch, which starred Hanks as fastidious small town cop Scott Turner, whose life is turned upside down when he welcomes a big messy French mastiff named Hooch. It was a modest success, but reviews were mixed and many members of the audience seemed more charmed by Beasley the dog than by the human acting alongside him. Heck, that wasn’t even the most popular movie of that year to pair a comedic actor with a police dog: Jim Belushi’s K-9 topped it by $ 7 million. But because Hanks became an American institution while Belushi continued to do According to Jim, the reputation of Turner & Hooch has grown significantly over the decades, leading to the premiere this week of a TV series on Disney +
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This is actually the second attempt to bring the title to television. In 1990, Thomas F. Wilson starred as Turner in an unsold comedy pilot. In the new show, Josh Peck plays Scott Turner’s son, also named Scott, a U.S. Marshal in San Francisco who separated from his father upon the recent death of the elder Scott. This Scott is even more of a neat monster than his namesake – his closest friend is his robot vacuum – and hilarity ensues when his clean and tidy life is disrupted by the arrival of another Hooch as a legacy of his father.It’s more or less the Disney + formula: use the intellectual property that Disney owns to inspire series that Gen-Xs and millennials will watch with their children (see: The Mighty Ducks: game changers ). Everything old has become new again, and who doesn’t love a good guy who drools a lot? Nostalgia is particularly strong here, since the showrunner is
Burn notice creator Matt Nix, and Nix is at his best when paying homage to the TV action dramas he grew up watching. But a show that covers eras and target demographics is a very difficult beast to keep on a leash. Netflix says Cobra Kai is a huge hit (or became one after the streamer saved it from YouTube), but
Game changers The first season has barely made waves, and Disney has yet to announce a renewal. And creatively, trying to offer something for everyone might not really satisfy anyone. This is the kind of limbo of storytelling in which this Gnole is widely found. Had a show exactly like it was back then Splash was at the movies, the young me would have gobbled up every episode with pleasure, like Hooch going into town on his food bowl. But it leans way too far into the cheesy aesthetic of this kind of light drama, creating something too silly and childish for most adults, but probably too old-fashioned for their own children. It’s a show that premieres with a gun-wielding Turner warning the bad guy, “Drop him!” Or you are dog food! And the one where the second episode is… a PG-rated
Die hard
tribute
where Scott fights terrorists in a barefoot hotel in a baggy jersey? It’s overkill to pay homage to an entirely different film franchise in the second episode only, but at least Reginald VelJohnson played the hero’s (human) partner in both films. To Nix’s credit, he seems to understand that this is all just a lark, so he doesn’t worry too much about the details. After Hooch helps Scott and his partner Jessica (Cara Patterson) solve a case, their boss James Mendez (Anthony Ruvivar) impulsively decides to turn them into a K-9 unit; during the scene, it’s a miracle that Ruvivar isn’t just looking at the pilot’s director, McG, to ask if this is really something happening right now. The goal is to bring the title characters together as quickly as possible and have Scott faithfully run after his unwanted new pet / partner as Hooch demonstrates almost superhuman powers of deduction. “We’re following an FBI agent because your dog has a hunch?” Jessica asks skeptically in an opening scene, before quickly signing with Team Hooch with Erica (Vanessa Lengies), a dog trainer who works for the Marshals. Anything that hinders Hooch’s criminal ascent should not be disturbed. Between the
charlie’s angels cinema,Terminator Hi
, and the short duration Deadly weapon series, McG has had some experience – good and bad – trying to modernize famous IP. Five different French Mastiffs are playing the new Hooch, and they’re all as disgusting and adorable as they need to be. They also make an already thankless task for poor Josh Peck even more thankless. He not only has to succeed one of the most beloved and superhuman actors of our time, but he has to star the majority of his scenes opposite a cute, slobbery little monster who seems to be put down to earth to distract from him. everyone, former child stars included (Peck rose to fame as Josh in Drake and Josh
). Peck is convincingly tense and bored by Hooch, and has some lovely, dramatic moments as Scott uses the dog as a way to overcome his grief and his difficult relationship with his father. But he doesn’t share Hanks’ ease of squeezing life and laughs at the generic and explanatory dialogue – of which this show has a lot. Very quickly, the partnership – between Peck and his canine co-stars, and between Turner and Hooch – begins to feel one-sided in favor of his shorter member. It is also possible that I am overthinking this. The dog is great. The action sequences, while downright cheesy, also showcase the kind of solid, practical craftsmanship that has been a staple of Nix since the days when
Burn Notice has become the defining issue of the USA Network. And that’s perhaps all one expects from a sequel to a movie whose most ardent supporters would argue for greatness only in the realm of on-screen drool. Burn Notice and the shows it inspired were themselves shameless nostalgia holds like this; they were just trying to remind their viewers of a more general aesthetic from their childhood, rather than a specific title. This approach leaves less room for error, but if you remind people of a cute, albeit lesser, Hanks vehicle, or just use the new Hooch on cartoon villains with guns, give them the ‘televisual equivalent of a belly rub, so maybe Nix and the company understood their mission perfectly. Turner & Hooch premieres July 21 on Disney +, with episodes released weekly. I saw the first three.
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