This show is aiming for a very niche audience: our, 'detective with a burden' is battier than Monk, drunker than House, smarter than Sherlock, and doesn't seem to have a gun, although the charming Leslie Ann Warren playing his mother loves guns and is seen cleaning and oiling a vast collection of antique muskets and rifles which she uses to deter the advances of our tec's giant pet alligator. Our grounded sidekick with their own life is a single mom who is also the cop in charge of collecting enough speeding tickets to balance the city budget. A previous reviewer took issue with the scene where Bellwether (of course that's his name, but most folks call him Bell) smokes Toad but it's a bravura bit, and the show spent a bunch of FX money animating the horns and flies and stuff. As for the niche bit, it's written with the headiest post-peak-tv dialogue imaginable - "Do you prefer hefeweizen or muscadet with oysters?" is used as a distraction - and the metatext is the application of therapeutic practices in the damaged lives of our subjects, and how they are both going to make each other better people. Catch it now, there's no way in hell anything this far up my alley is going to be renewed.
Review of Panhandle
