Denis Leary’s Fox Military Comedy Lacks Edge

If I had the magical formula for a hit television show, I’d probably be using that formula in a more lucrative job. But it’s safe to say that the magical formula would not be a combination of Enlisted, a series Fox canceled after a single season, and Brockmire, a show IFC allowed to run for four seasons despite linear ratings the size of a well-attended college football game.

That said, Enlisted was a terrific show, an unlikely alchemy of broad sitcom laughs and actual patriotism, and Brockmire was one of my favorite shows of the past decade, a deliriously profane comedy with an uncompromising sweetness. So if Fox wants to program a new series that is unquestionably the creative offspring of Brockmire and Enlisted, who am I to quibble about its commercial prospects?

Going Dutch, that self-evident spawn of Enlisted and Brockmire, doesn’t rise to the level of either of those shows. It’s a series with immediately settled characters and performances plus colorful (if overly sanitized) dialogue, but a questionable sense of episodic storytelling. Still, if you asked me to place a bet on a show becoming pretty decent by its hypothetical second season, the pieces are already very much in place for Going Dutch — assuming it finds a popularity that precedent suggests is unlikely.

Hailing from Brockmire creator Joel Church-Cooper, Going Dutch is the story of Colonel Patrick Quinn (Denis Leary), a decorated military legend who thinks his time has finally come to ascend to the command position at a combat base in Germany. Accompanied by his aide-de-camp Abraham Shah (Danny Pudi), Quinn gets summoned into a meeting with General Davidson (Joe Morton) expecting congratulations. Instead, the general plays a video of a training exercise that concluded with Quinn having a full meltdown, complete with an obscenity-filled tirade directed at General Davidson. Oops.

Instead of commanding a combat base in Germany, Quinn is “rewarded” with a posting at USAG Stroopsdorf, described in onscreen text as the “Least Important U.S. Army Base in the World.” Stroopsdorf, somewhere in the Netherlands, is famous for three things: cheese, laundry and bowling.

Stroopsdorf is a service base populated by misfits, including unkempt IT guy Papadakis (Hal Cumpston) and resourceful scavenger Conway (Laci Mosley), but without a trained soldier in sight. There’s no discipline. There are, in fact, no guns, because nobody knows where to find the guns.

But the demeaning posting isn’t punishment enough. Davidson has put Quinn loosely in charge of a base that was provisionally being run by… Captain Maggie Quinn (Taylor Misiak), the colonel’s long-estranged daughter.

Can Colonel Quinn whip Stroopsdorf into shape, while repairing his relationship with a woman who has made rebelling against her father (by following in his footsteps) into her entire personality?

So does my Brockmire-meets-Enlisted comparison at least make sense? Because it’s fairly obvious, with a temperamental, foul-mouthed dinosaur losing one job after a truth-telling outburst, going to a last-chance job accompanied by a young subordinate, and trying to repair a relationship with the only woman capable of loving him for who he is and therefore redeeming him. Going Dutch doesn’t have quite the same overt affection for our armed forces, even the renegades among them, that made Enlisted such an unexpected treasure. But once the last of three non-sequential episodes sent to critics featured a great guest appearance by Parker Young, that comparison was mighty obvious as well.

The things that Going Dutch has going for it are obvious as well. Leary is probably a few years past the moment at which he would have been perfect casting in this role, but it’s easy to see how this sort of no-filter grouch, with utter contempt for almost every personality trait exhibited by his young charges, fits right into his wheelhouse. Misiak, so wonderful in the first season of FXX’s Dave and then so strangely underutilized in the two subsequent seasons, offers a sunny counterpoint, with a one-of-the-guys lack of self-consciousness that shows that Maggie is her father’s daughter. Mosley delivers some of the off-kilter enthusiasm I enjoyed in the short-lived Florida Girls, while Pudi is always excellent at socially awkward officiousness. Throw in Morton, who has made amiable viciousness into a trademark of this phase of his career, and Catherine Tate as a Dutch brothel madam with a PhD, and Going Dutch has the sort of ensemble already in place for long-term laughs.

The immediate-term laughs are less forthcoming. A not-insignificant problem is that Church-Cooper’s comic rhythms, exemplified by the rat-a-tat cadences shared by Brockmire and Colonel Quinn, are funniest when punctuated by obscenities. The rant that dooms Quinn to Stroopsdorf — yes, “Stroopsdorf” is a funny word — is at least peppered with bleeped obscenities and, as the classic one-and-done Fox comedy Action proved, bleeped obscenities can be hilarious. But that isn’t an approach Church-Cooper takes here, for the most part. The lack of swearing is a hindrance, and the overall smoothing out of what should be Colonel Quinn’s rough edges for a broadcast TV audience is worse.

As it stands, Quinn is only slightly un-PC, rather than in serious need of personality overhaul the way Jim Brockmire was. I’d be curious who determined that “midget” was the taboo bridge-too-far to show how out of touch he is, though he quickly learns that the word is off-limits and adjusts his behavior immediately, because he’s not a monster. Making fun of gout, though? Totally fair. Oh, and in the episodes sent to critics, Colonel Quinn is not one of those dinosaurs who wants to rant about young people and their pesky pronouns, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Going Dutch would probably be funnier on FX or IFC or a streamer. But above all, Going Dutch could benefit from the ability to stretch episodes to 28 or 32 minutes; more than the lack of swearing, what disappointed me here was the fact that every episodic plot felt like it was missing at least one key story beat, possibly more (to say nothing of a concrete perspective on the military, the thing that helped give Enlisted its backbone). The show leans into parades and training exercises, and in each episode I kept waiting for something to get genuinely wacky only to find the lack of escalation rather peculiar.

The episode with Parker Young, playing a CIA operative dating Maggie, came the closest to having a plot that built to something properly farcical. But even that was rushed, and the fact that Fox skipped over multiple episodes to give this one to critics as a showcase doesn’t bode well.

I’ll keep watching Going Dutch, though. I loved Enlisted and I really loved Brockmire, and I love a lot of the cast and hints of characterization in Going Dutch. Who knows what excellent-but-unsuccessful shows could be hybridized if this somehow works!