TV Reviews : CBS’ ‘Broken Badges’ Needs to Be Recalled

“Broken Badges” is a grating echo of “The A-Team” from Stephen J. Cannell, a new CBS series about as dully formulaic and predictable as television gets. Although regularly airing at 9 p.m., it premieres at 8 tonight (on Channels 2 and 8) with a distended two-hour episode so incredibly exciting and suspenseful that you’re constantly on the edge of your seat.

Poised to sleep.

What we get tonight are the beginnings of one of those special undercover police units assigned to cases that regular cops can’t or won’t handle. The location is a place called Bay City, Calif.

The leader will be police psychologist Eleanor Hardwick (Terry Donahoe), whose by-the-book methods will clash with the street-toughness of Beau Jack Bowman (Miguel Ferrer, who also plays forensics expert Albert Rosenfield on ABC’s “Twin Peaks”).

A New Orleans Cajun cop destined to be the group’s main member, Beau Jack arrives in Bay City with a murder suspect he is supposed to turn over to the local cops. However, the suspect escapes after being left alone in a crowded airport, handcuffed to a baggage rack. A murder suspect left alone? So much for credibility.

Beau Jack better retrieve the suspect, his chief screams at him on the phone, or DON’T BOTHER TO COME BACK!!! He doesn’t bother to come back.

Gradually, Bowman meets the other cops who at the end of the episode will be his colleagues in the unit. Psychological misfits and dangerously unstable, here they are: nerdy ventriloquist Stanley Jones (Jay Johnson), who has a fistfight with his uniformed puppet; stressed-out Toby Baker (Ernie Hudson) and J. J. Tingreedes (Eileen Davidson), a tattooed, leather-loving wild woman so addicted to danger--ooooooh--that no other cop will work with her.

Somehow, these raucous clown cops will get their act together and track down the murder suspect and the white-collar meanies behind an insidious plot to undermine quaint old Bay City. It gets ugly. Sample dialogue: “I will not hesitate to drop you like a set of keys, you got that?”

This story is not just full of holes, it is a hole, a huge one. Just how it is that Beau Jack becomes Bay City Jack, working for yet another chief who hates his guts, is a thing of wonder.

“Broken Badges,” a series you want to drop like a set of keys.