Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Calling’ On Peacock, About An NYPD Detective Who Is Guided By His Faith While Solving Crimes

One of the oldest tropes on TV is the “magical detective.” The person has some sort of ability that goes beyond what a normal police or private detective has, and gives that person a preternatural ability to solve the most impossible cases. We don’t think we’ve ever seen a detective that uses his religious upbringing as that “superpower.” But a new series from David E. Kelley and Barry Levinson explores just that.

THE CALLING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The camera pans down to a nighttime crime scene in New York.

The Gist: The scene is a man who was killed when he hit his head on the sidewalk after being pushed down by a guy in a hot dog suit. NYPD detective Avraham Avraham (Jeff Wilbusch) is called on the scene, joining young detective Janine Harris (Juliana Canfield). Something about the story of the guy in the hot dog costume doesn’t add up, and when he questions the guy back at the station, treating him with respect and consideration, the man breaks down and admits he slugged the guy.

His colleagues, like his fellow detective Earl Malzone (Michael Mosley) and his captain, Kathleen Davies (Karen Robinson), admire his ability to get witnesses to open up. “It’s almost unfair,” says Capt. Davies. “The Talmud teaches us to see a single person as the whole world, and that each person is entitled to infinite respect and concern,” Avi says to Janine when she asks him how he gets people to unburden themselves.

Avi is a religious Jew — there’s a scene of him davening on the roof of his building — and he uses his faith and his religious teachings to lead him while solving crimes. It comes into play when Nora Conte (Stephanie Szostak) comes in to report that her teenage son Vincent (Charlie Besso) is missing. As he questions Nora, and neighbors including Zack Miller (Noel Fisher), the teen’s writing tutor who himself is going through some life frustrations, Avi starts to believe that not everything about Vincent’s life is as it seems at first.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Calling has that “special detective” vibe of Sherlock, though with a whole more seriousness. Maybe Sherlock crossed with a few elements of Shtisel mixed in.

Our Take: It was hard for us to figure out just where The Calling was going during its first episode. Written and produced by David E. Kelley, with fellow EP Barry Levinson directing all the episodes, the show is based on a novel series by D.A. Mishani. But in Mishani’s books, Avraham Avraham is a police inspector in Tel Aviv. Transferring Avi to New York and giving him a New York background — he said he grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn — makes his methods more unusual in context. But it also makes the way he goes about his job feel more like a sideshow than something born from his faith and religious teachings.

Perhaps we need a little bit more background. Having an Israeli actor like Wilbusch in the role of Avi and having him make no attempt to hide his accent, indicates that Avi grew up in a cloistered ultraorthodox community. When did he decide to go against that community and join the NYPD? And how does he maintain his faith in the face of murders and other violent crimes? Knowing more about Avi and how he got to that point would make him into a well-rounded person and not the “magic detective” trope we mentioned earlier, one who seems to have no outside life beyond his job and faith.

We also get a lot of insight into Zack Miller’s life, as he gets harsh criticism from a writing class instructor, which leads him to have some too-aggressive sex with his wife Dania (Annabelle Dexter-Jones). It seems like the Millers will be linked to Vincent’s disappearance in some way, but we’re not sure how at this point. So, for now, Zack’s story is free-floating, not anchored to the continuing narrative enough for us to care about it.

With Kelley writing and Levinson directing, there’s no chance that The Calling is going to look or feel like the average network police procedural. There’s a depth to the dialogue that makes that evident. We’re just not sure what to make of how Avi is characterized on the show, if any of his fellow cops are anything but one-dimensional characters, and if the case of the missing teenager is enough to craft an entire season’s arc out of.

Sex and Skin: Besides Zack’s aforementioned aggressive bathtub sex with his wife, there isn’t any.

Parting Shot: Avi is called to a dumpster on an industrial pier. “We better call the parents,” he says to the cop who’s there.

Sleeper Star: Juliana Canfield, who plays Avi’s eventual partner Janine, does just enough to call Avi out on his personality and some of his other quirks, but sincerely wants to learn from him.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Fuck you. You imply that a father isn’t concerned about his missing child? That gets you a ‘fuck you,'” Vincent’s father Leonard (Steven Pasquale) says to Avi when the detective questions why he was still on his business trip when Vincent’s mother reported him missing.

Our Call: SKIP IT. In The Calling, Kelley and Levinson make Avraham Avraham’s faith his “superpower” as a detective, which not only completely short circuits a deeper sketch of Avi himself but makes religion and faith into a tool instead of a way of life.

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.