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There are some things to like about the Fox cop drama K-Ville, which premieres at 9 p.m. Monday.

First and foremost, the series, which is about a pair of cops in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, is being filmed on location in the city. That's good news for a place that's still struggling with reconstruction efforts two years after being blasted by one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history.

The money spent filming a TV series there sure can't hurt, and word is that some of the cast and crew of K-Ville have pitched in during their off hours to work with Habitat for Humanity.

Another thing to like about the show is lead actor Anthony Anderson, a physically imposing screen presence whether he's doing comedy (Barbershop, All About the Andersons ) or drama (gang leader Antwon Mitchell in The Shield). In K-Ville,
it's strictly drama so far, with Anderson in the role of Officer Marlin Boulet, a basically decent but troubled character.

Unfortunately, that just about concludes our discussion of the upside of
K-Ville. Aside from the fact that it's set in still-ravaged New Orleans, the series is basically just another cop show, and not a very dynamic one at that.
It's part police procedural (Law & Order, NYPD Blue), where the good guys get to solve a crime each week, and part buddy cop show (think Starsky & Hutch, or even better, the Lethal Weapon movies), where two seemingly mismatched partners somehow mesh to form a solid crime-busting unit.

We're introduced to Anderson's character in a flashback to 2005, just after the hurricane roared through the city. Marlin is in flat-out hero mode, trying to save survivors from the floodwaters, and from each other, while his partner is
running off to save his own skin.

Eventually, he gets a new partner, a quiet guy named Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser), an ex-military man with a murky past. Cobb claims he's from Cincinnati, but he sure seems to know a lot about the local terrain.

While trying to protect his city, Marlin is also trying to keep his own life together. His wife and daughter have abandoned New Orleans for the relative safety of Atlanta, leaving Marlin to live alone in their flood-damaged home — which is in the Lower Ninth Ward, the hardest-hit portion of the city.

In the show's pilot episode, there are plenty of scenes of gutted buildings, empty and deserted houses, and huge piles of trash, all evidently meant to remind viewers that New Orleans is still very much a decimated city. But it seems as though the city is used for little more than a backdrop for the same old car chases and gun battles that we've seen a million times on other shows.

And speaking of shooting … in more than one scene, cops are shown running down a crowded street, tossing off shots at the fleeing bad guys. I'm pretty sure that cops don't really do that — in New Orleans or anyplace else. There's probably a chapter in the cop handbook about the inadvisability of blowing away innocent bystanders.

To their credit, the series' writers do try to incorporate a local angle into the plot of the premiere episode, with a farfetched story line involving someone's efforts to sabotage fund-raising activities aimed at helping rebuild the city.

Though the show's dialogue isn't as snappy as what we've become accustomed to in the summer's gritty cable series, some of it works pretty well. When Marlin's wife returns briefly to retrieve some things from their house, she tells him exactly why she's not planning to stick around:

'Half this city still reeks of mold and toxic sludge,' she says. 'The schools are even worse. The crime … baby, it's not the same place, and it's never gonna be.'

By the way, in case you were wondering, the series' title is supposed to be a shorthand form of 'Katrinaville,' which the producers thought was a cool name, but which news reports maintain that nobody in New Orleans really uses to describe their city.

K-Ville may get a boost its first night because it follows the season opener of the hit series Prison Break. But if it doesn't hook its audience then and there, the new show will likely be in trouble, because the following week it will be up against mega-hit Heroes, which begins its own new season on NBC.

And that could wash away K-Ville just as quickly as any hurricane.

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