Screwball Corruption on ‘The Job’

Can police corruption be funny? If it’s of the screwball variety found on “The Job,” the answer is yes, but only if you don’t mind some extra vice in your vice squad.

Comedian Denis Leary stars in and helped create this comedy series about New York City police detectives, which hit the air last season with six episodes on ABC. Thanks to some tinkering with the network’s lineup earlier this month, the show has returned for the second half of this season.

Tonight’s episode at 9:30, the third since the comeback, amply demonstrates just how crooked, if not entirely bent, the series’ thin blue line can be.

One opportunistic detective, Tommy (Adam Ferrara), has returned from the scene of a suicide with the victim’s telescope, and he has surveillance on his mind. Or as the veteran Frank (Lenny Clarke) succinctly puts it: “Tommy stole a telescope from a dead guy, and now we’re looking for naked chicks.”

Their prurience is quickly rewarded, much to the delight of Leary’s Det. Mike McNeil, a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, sarcastic cop with a wife, a kid and a mistress. (Guess which of the three seems to take up most of his free time?) It isn’t long before McNeil hatches a plan worthy of Lucy Ricardo, if she’d been male, lecherous and foulmouthed, and the scheme leads to some improbable complications.

Despite McNeil’s more deplorable traits, or perhaps because of them, Leary’s character is actually quite likable, a rebel who operates outside departmental and societal codes of conduct just to make it through another workday.

And, with the major exceptions of his straight-as-an-arrow partner Pip (Bill Nunn), semi-strait-laced fellow detective Jan (Diane Farr) and tough-talking boss (Keith David), McNeil is hardly alone.

No doubt, this precinct of policemen behaving badly would not be pleasant to inhabit in real life. But for the purposes of slapstick comedy with a mordant edge, it’s a nice enough place to visit.