THE ROOKIE

STARRING: Nathan Fillion, Alyssa Diaz, Eric Winter

In The Rookie’s first scene, John Nolan holds his divorce papers and gets pistol-whipped by a bank robber. Rough couple of minutes – but John is played by Fillion, so you can’t help but be charmed. Fillion became an oldfashioned TV star across years of Castle, and the good thing about The Rookie is how effectively a similar-but-different vehicle has been conjured to showcase his charisma.

Unlike Castle’s fantasy of sleuthdom, John joins the LAPD as a fortysomething street cop, and the reality leaves him gasping for air. “Personal reinvention via law enforcement” sounds like a cheap pitch, and other characters are sceptical of John. His sergeant (Richard T Jones) thinks he’s a walking midlife crisis and his training officer, Talia Bishop (Afton Williamson), thinks he’s a career roadblock.

The other good thing about The Rookie: it isn’t just Nathan Fillion Solves Crimes. The pilot establishes his fellow newbies – no-bull Lucy (Melissa O’Neil) and legacy cop Jackson (Titus Makin) – as full-fledged characters with their own talents and struggles. Another training officer, Angela (Diaz), has a friendly rivalry with Bishop.

The pilot episode is a grab bag of loopy Los Angeles criminality: man having a breakdown on Hollywood Boulevard, missing child locked in a car mid-heatwave, cop car copulation. The tone veers, sometimes madly, between humane cleverness and speechy solemnity. But this feels like an ensemble with real potential. At one point, long day done, the rookie cops flee to a karaoke joint. Lucy and Jackson duet on Rihanna – and John just sits patiently, enjoying the show like the rest of us. (Starts Mon., Aug. 5 at 8.30pm; Seven)

“Not everybody can relate to being cops,” Fillion says, “But people can certainly relate to a do-over.”