The Unusuals

The oddball overload bugs at first, but the incredibly likable cast makes The Unusuals unusually promising.

Look a little closer, though, and what you'll find is a truly strange cop dramedy with lots of sharp dialogue, jocular banter and offbeat scenarios.

The first episode is entertaining and promising enough that viewers may get excited about seeing the second one.

That's a lot of eccentricity, but creator/writer Noah Hawley meshes humor and pathos with deft plotting and dialogue.

The cast is excellent, and there's potential here, even though tonight's opening episode, as pilots will, tries a little too hard.

Shraeger is played with breezy, cynical wit by Amber Tamblyn (who may have her own secrets; she's looking rather more bosomy than she did a few years back as God's BFF in in "Joan of Arcadia"). And she gets capable backup from a cast that includes Adam Goldberg and Harold Perrineau.

What The Unusuals lacks in cinematic sheen, it compensates with humor and a more interesting group of characters.

Everygirl Amber Tamblyn is miscast as a cop with a fancy Upper East Side pedigree, but the rest of the ensemble is great, including Harold Perrineau as a paranoid cop and Adam Goldberg as his self-destructive partner. Quirky feels like a curse word, tainted forever by the legacy of David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, etc.), but The Unusuals might actually turn the word back into praise.

The Unusuals doesn’t have the balance between the comedy and the serious stuff right yet, but Terry Kinney lends a welcome acerbic note as the station’s seen-it-all leader, Sgt. Harvey Brown.

The series--a replacement of sorts for "Life On Mars" as the strange, spiritually-infused cop show--definitely has its moments, and they aren't as few and far between as I'd imagined.