This cop show takes place in East New York. A deprived neighborhood in Brooklyn. The series begin when Regina Haywood steps into the police office of 74th precinct as a newly recruited commanding officer. She sets the tone for how the police should work. They should build good relationships with the citizens of East New York. She pushes that agenda to the extent so that the police officers are recommended to move into one of the housing projects in the neighbourhood. One young female police officer thinks that's a good idea and moves in to an apartment in a building with only black tenants (she is white). That part of the show is pretty interesting, how the police officer tries to fit in to an environment where she clearly isn't wanted. However, the show isn't build showing complicated cases where the police officers spend hours of trying to figure out who did it. Instead the viewer is offered something that is more similar to Law and Order and all the other TV-shows available late night on TV. In every episode there's a new case (so you won't loose track if you skip an episode). But the way the cases are solved are on the other hand rushed through, and in some cases the police officers draw conclusions that aren't really clear to the viewer. The show isn't based on the idea that there should be an intellectual process of solving a case, it's based on the idea that the case should be solved within 40 minutes and therefore the logic of the story has to be sacrificed in order to make it in time. The only reason I continued to watch this show was because it was on HBO, which means no annoying commercials. But I could just as well had watched Law and Order or CSI. This show is nowhere near as great as police shows like Bosch, The Wire or Line of Duty. I have read some of the reviews saying that this show is character driven. Not really. The characters are mostly pretty cliche. You have seen similar characters in plenty of other police shows. You don't get to know anything private about the characters. There isn't time for that, because a case has to be solved within 40 minutes.
Review of East New York
