Peter Krause Stars In NBC Drama

We’ve watched enough TV drama pilots by now that we can almost feel it coming: the big, shocking plot twist at the very end of the pilot that Changes Everything and leaves us dying to see the next episode to find out what happens next. (Well, the networks hope so, anyway.) NBC’s new drama “Line of Fire” — premiering this Monday at 10 p.m.; I’ve seen the first two episodes — has a plot twist like that… and hoo boy, it’s a particularly ridiculous one. In fact, that ridiculous twist kind of sums up “Line of Fire” as a whole: overstuffed, hard to believe, and way more interested in shocking us than in building a compelling story.

It’s always nice to see Peter Krause back on our TVs (#TeamBraverman4eva), and he stars here as Mike Hollingsworth, a Secret Service agent on the verge of retirement and the patriarch of a family of law enforcement officers. Hope Davis (“Your Honor”) plays Mike’s estranged wife Jane, who’s a U.S. Marshal, and their three kids work at the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Department of Justice. (Jeez, don’t jaywalk around this family!) When a deputy U.S. Marshal is killed by a mystery assailant, the authorities think it’s an open-and-shut case, but FBI daughter Clare (Kat Cunning) wants to keep digging, and soon enough, the whole clan is involved. Plus, Mike is still trying to track down an attempted presidential assassin from years ago, his Secret Service son Micah (Tommy O’Brien) is getting too close to the President’s daughter… and there might be a deep, dark family secret that even the kids don’t know.

At first, “Line of Fire” seems to be going for “Blue Bloods” vibes, with its family full of law enforcers talking shop while plating salads. But this is a fractured family: Mom and Dad are separated, and they don’t exactly sit down for regular Sunday night dinners. Instead, the show turns out to be an uneasy mix of crime procedural, conspiracy thriller, and family dramedy that threatens to spill over with excess plot. The Secret Service storyline with Mike and Micah is more than enough on its own for one show, and then the FBI and U.S. Marshals investigation (complete with simmering tension between Clare and her mom Jane) adds a whole other show’s worth of storylines. Plus, the second episode piles on even more crimes for the family to solve — as if it wasn’t crowded enough in here already.

“Line of Fire” hails from writer and creator Joshua Safran, who previously worked on “Gossip Girl” and “Quantico” and has even compared this show to a “procedural ‘Gossip Girl'” — which gives you a pretty good indication of the level of grit and authenticity we’re dealing with here. It’s soapy to a fault and completely removed from reality, with Mike’s family committing a number of massive ethical breaches on the job in the first two episodes alone, either to help or to antagonize their fellow family members. (These people seemingly don’t have bosses to answer to and just do what they want with impunity.) We also get tired clichés like a killer leaving tiny origami cranes at the crime scene as a calling card, and then there’s the aforementioned Big Twist, which is laughably ludicrous at first… and then gets even more ludicrous the more you think about it. (We get a big hint that something is not right here when we spot a prominent TV actor in a seemingly throwaway role.)

This all might work better if Mike’s family felt like an actual family, but they don’t. The performances are a little bland across the board, and the feisty jabs that are peppered throughout the siblings’ dialogue don’t really land. The show also seems uninterested in developing any characters outside of the family beyond mere plot devices. It’s a symptom of a bigger problem, really: “Line of Fire” leans too heavily into plot at the expense of character, giving us plenty of twists — but if a show doesn’t lay the groundwork by infusing humanity into its characters, all those plot twists don’t mean anything to us as viewers. “Line of Fire” feels like the kind of show that could run for a dozen seasons on network TV, and it does have plot to spare… but it’s lacking in the kind of genuine human emotion that brings us back each week.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Peter Krause’s new NBC drama “Line of Fire” misses the mark, bogged down by too much plot, not enough character, and one particularly ludicrous twist.