Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Coyote’ On CBS All Access, Where Michael Chiklis Is A Former Border Patrol Agent Forced To Transport People Into The U.S.

Coyote was originally made to air on the Paramount Network, before ViacomCBS moved it to CBS All Access, and in a lot of ways, the show fits that network’s old scripted series profile. But, in watching the first episode, it looks like it will go deeper than the “us vs. them” theme surrounding undocumented immigration from Mexico to the U.S. But will it actually do that?

COYOTE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A group of people sit in the back of a truck with a small flock of sheep, ready to be secretly transported into the U.S. over the Mexican border.

The Gist: Things get violent when the group is being told by their transporters to put on bulletproof vest, with the assumption that there are drugs in the truck. The cartel guys shoot a couple members of the group, and three of them flee. As they cross the desert towards the border wall, they see an American man, limping and otherwise in distress, going the other way.

Five days earlier, we see Ben Clemens (Michael Chiklis), who has been a Border Patrol officer for 32 years, monitoring the border wall between California and Tijuana. He stops off at a storage facility to use the bathroom, and he notices something on the floor. He hides out in his patrol truck, then crawls back in through the window, lifts a tile and sees a tunnel. He goes in without backup and finds that some cartel members are pulling a woman through against her will. He manages to subdue the cartel members, who were transporting multiple pounds of coke.

As much as he’d like to investigate further, he goes back to the office and gets a surprise retirement party. It’s his last day on the job, and, though he knows the day was coming, he doesn’t want to go. When we see him next, he’s volunteering to shape up the Mexican fishing cabin his former partner Javi (Jose Pablo Cantillo) bought before he died so he can sell it and get Javi’s family out of debt. He also goes to his daughter’s college graduation party, feeling so completely out of place he brings his young former colleague Garrett (George Pullar) as his plus-1.

While in Mexico, he goes to Javi’s favorite restaurant and finds that the local cartel thugs have the run of the place, even when the cops are there. A young pregnant waitress named Maria Elena Flores (Emy Mena) is supposedly the girlfriend of the main thug, but she looks like that’s an arrangement that’s more coerced than anything else. The cafe’s owner, Silvia Peña (Adriana Paz), who had a relationship with Javi, tells Ben that there are many people on her side of the line need more empathy from people like him and, in the past, Javi. “It was my job to keep my side of the line as safe as possible,” he tells her.

But when Maria Elena comes to Ben for help to escape her “boyfriend”, who is threatening to kill her and her unborn child, Ben is in a pickle. First he brings her to the police, who only warn him that will make things worse, which he finds out When she comes to him again, this time bloody, he tries to hide her from a couple of the boyfriends thugs who have come to get her. That’s when things take a turn for the worse.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Breaking Bad, but with the subject being illegal immigration instead of illegal meth.

Our Take: There’s something about Coyote, created by David Graziano, Michael Carnes and Josh Gilbert that feels a little bit off. It’s not the performance by Chiklis, which is his usual combination of tough but with seeds of doubt. There is a piece of me that hopes to see the six-episode first season explore the immigration issue from the south-of-the-border perspective, where people risk their lives to come to the U.S. for either asylum or simply a better life. There’s a piece of me that hopes that Chiklis’ character Ben learns something from having to be an unwilling coyote. But there’s also a piece of me that thinks the show just isn’t that deep and will take some pretty bad turns.

By the description of the series, we know that Ben helping Maria Elena is going to get him in deep doo-doo with the local cartel, which is going to threaten his ex-wife Jill (Kelli Williams) and their daughter Katie (Amy Forsyth), forcing him into ferrying people and drugs across the border. As he gets in deeper, is he going to change a viewpoint shaped over 32 years of trying to keep undocumented immigrants out of the country, or is he still going to be the semi-asshole that he is at the start of the series?

The presence of Michelle MacLaren as an EP and director makes us hope it’s going to be more a more subtle take; she was responsible for directing some of the best episodes of the similarly-themed Breaking Bad, and will hopefully bring that touch to the episodes of Coyote that she directs. There are some scenes in the first episode that feel genuine, like the talk Ben has with Silvia about what people are facing on her side of the border.

But there’s also a whole bunch of evidence that this can fall into a “brown people bad, white people good” vibe that will make the show feel like a relic from 15 or 20 years ago, like the cop who tells Ben that bringing Maria Elena to the police “will just get her killed faster,” and Ben responds with, “She just picked the wrong guy.” The cop has to in form Ben that the thug chose her for his “girlfriend”; she had no part in it. You’d think he would have seen that from their first encounter.

Sex and Skin: Nothing, though there seems to be a spark between Katy and Garrett.

Parting Shot: After Maria Elena killed both of the thugs trying to take her back to her “boyfriend”, Ben tries to take her to the border and arrange asylum. But when the cops approach, he goes off-road to find a different way to get her to safety.

Sleeper Star: It was nice to see Kelli Williams, one of our favorite parts of The Practice. She’s playing Ben’s ex, one that wishes there was a way for them to still be married; it’ll be interesting to see how the threats against her and their daughter will play out.

Most Pilot-y Line: When the clerk at the storage place tells Ben the bathroom is for customers only, Ben says, “Perhaps you can make an exception; or I you can sell me one of those boxes and I’ll take a shit in that.” What a tough guy.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’ll give Coyote the benefit of the doubt, given the presence of both Chiklis and MacLaren. But we’re very wary that the show will fall back into some xenophobic tropes that will play very poorly in 2021.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Coyote On CBS All Access