So regular, they’re refreshing

I am favorably predisposed toward “Lincoln Heights,” a new series premiering tonight on ABC Family, for a couple of reasons. One is that it is a family drama at a time when family drama is at low ebb on television. And it’s not a clever turn on the genre, as is the stuff of premium cable (a family of gangsters, of undertakers, of polygamists), or the metaphorical families of twentysomethings or thirtysomethings who have roped their boats together in life’s midstream (as on, say, “Grey’s Anatomy”) or even (as on “Brothers and Sisters”) an actual family of adults who are off leading mostly separate lives.

There is a premise -- a police officer moves his family from the suburbs back to the inner-city neighborhood where he grew up and now patrols as part of a “police residency program” that allows him to buy a big house at low interest -- but no pathology. They are an average nuclear unit, the Suttons; they are not essentially dysfunctional.

Another thing in the series’ favor is that it is set in a working-class milieu, something that gets even less screen time than does family. Possibly it has been decided that stories about people who don’t have a lot of money are less friendly to the advertisers who make TV go -- certainly they provide less opportunity for upscale product placement -- and in a game-show society, where everyone seems to be waiting around to be rich, this may even be true. The two-income family at the center of “Lincoln Heights” is decidedly middle-class, but it is set down in the kind of neighborhood -- not the actual local Lincoln Heights, as far as I can tell, but economically similar -- that television, with few exceptions, views as a place to get out of, pass through or simply avoid.

It also boasts a talented and likable cast, led by Russell Hornsby as Officer Eddie Sutton and Nicki Micheaux as wife Jenn, who clearly know that to be ordinary is not necessarily to be uninteresting.

Given this, and without retracting my fundamental endorsement (I would recommend the show just for Micheaux, who commands attention whether she’s being sensible or melting down or tasting her husband’s overly al dente lasagna), I’m all the more disappointed by what strike me as its shortcomings -- a collection of missed opportunities, unrealized potential and stylistic missteps, the dramatic equivalent of sloppy margins, punctuation errors and spelling mistakes. Some of this is just what you routinely get from TV, after all, but it’s the promising child who most demands criticism.

Partly it’s a lack of thoroughness, thinking the premise through to build the kind of realistic tapestry of relationships that makes a good series great. There are small jarring moments, as when Eddie declares that he’ll always keep a roof over his family’s head and food on their table, when we have seen from the beginning that his wife also works. (She might have brought this up to him, later, profitably.) And while we’re told that he grew up a couple of blocks away from his new homestead, he has no old friends, or even enemies, in the neighborhood. And as a cop who patrols it, he seems strangely unfamiliar with the people who live there -- shopkeepers to whose call he might have responded, kids he might have had an opportunity to caution or arrest, anybody.

Certainly he would have at least heard something of Donelle Williams (Greg Davis Jr., also currently of the TBS series “10 Items or Less”), a local gang leader and community watchdog who appears suddenly out of the night to assert territorial claims. Their encounters are some of the pilot’s most vital moments -- but Donelle, whose apparently conflicting impulses might be worth exploring, is sacrificed by the end of the first episode in a burst of sentimental melodrama that would have had more impact if we’d gotten to know him a little better, and whose emotional repercussions are mostly glossed over. It also turns the next episode, at least, into a cop show. (That Davis is a charismatic actor just doubles the loss.)

Things move too fast, as if the producers (Kevin Hooks and Kathleen McGhee-Anderson are in charge here) felt the hot breath of cancellation upon their necks: Issues that might be spun out and delved into over episodes are dispensed with neatly and quickly, whether it’s young son Tay (Mishon Ratliff) being bullied for his lunch money or the house being broken into, or the very question of whether the family should have moved in the first place. Indeed, even as Dad broaches that question, they gather around him in unlikely support. You would think that with three kids (Erica Hubbard as older daughter Cassie and Rhyon Brown as Lizzie round out the household), at least one would be really, really mad.

There’s an unfortunate tendency also toward obvious and easy triumph -- when Lizzie finally gets into a basketball game at school, she scores the winning point. The production, too, is on overdrive: lots of zooms and pans that make crises of whatever they touch.

The first two episodes burn through a lot of melodrama; perhaps they can move on now to something more life-sized. There is plenty of real drama to be had out of the small problems of learning a new place, downscale or not. I would like to see Eddie out mowing his lawn or talking to the neighbors about potholes. Or to know what it’s like to get your own room at the price of your old life. There is no reason, of course, why the producers should make the series that I see in my head, but I can always hope they will.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘Lincoln Heights’

Where: ABC Family

When: Premieres 7 and 10 tonight

Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for young children under the age of 14)