Cheese and laundry are the daily duties for Denis Leary army comedy ‘Going Dutch’
“Going Dutch” is a contemporary military workplace family comedy, not necessarily in that adjectival order. Denis Leary, with a distracting dye job, plays self-important Army Col. Patrick Quinn, who is expecting to take over command of an important post in Germany when a vindictive general (Joe Morton), who has heard a tape of Quinn saying terrible things about him — so terrible that all we hear are censoring bleeps — gets him reassigned to a base in the Netherlands whose main occupations are laundry, cheese-making and something to do with bowling. Though it is described in a title as “the least important U.S. Army base in the world,” you could do worse than spend your enlistment working in a fromagerie. And you’d have a trade when you got out.
Quinn, whose puffed-out chest can barely contain all the ribbons and medals pasted to it, is, however, not happy; the base’s lack of discipline — nobody salutes, but they might wave — offends his aggressive sense of order, readiness and army life. (Is the dye job a character choice, to amplify his narcissism? You have to hope.) He becomes even unhappier when he discovers that his estranged daughter, Capt. Maggie Quinn (Taylor Misiak), is in charge of the place as interim commander. They have issues, amplified by having not seen one another in many years, and Quinn’s not wanting to admit they have them. He has another daughter, far offstage, and a grandchild whose existence he needs prompting to remember.
The prompter is his devoted executive officer, Maj. Abraham Shah (Danny Pudi, nice to see), who knows how to handle Quinn, a boiling kettle who grapples with politically correct language and modern technology. Shah is quickly seen to be developing a crush on Maggie. On her side of the seesaw are Laci Mosley as Sgt. Dana Conway, the Milo Minderbinder of the story, who can source anything, anyhow, and keeps a closetful of things she shouldn’t have; nervous Pvt. “B.A.” Chapman (Dempsey Bryk, very funny fainting); and IT genius Corp. Elias Papadakis (Hal Cumpston), whose long hair, mustache and weight are issues for Quinn, though not for Papadakis.
Quinn: “You’re too fat to be here.”
Papadakis: “So should we like move to a conference room? I mean I wouldn’t mind more leg room, no offense.”
Created by Joel Church-Cooper (“Brockmire”), the show is essentially conventional and can be more than a bit silly — the second episode involves stealing a tank, as a sort of balm to Quinn’s bruised ego. In its opening gambit it follows the “Bad News Bears” playbook, which has served America well these 49 years, though if any self-improvement is to come, it will be on the part of the new captain and not the team, who are quite happy in their cheese-making, laundry-cleaning work and unusually fine dining room.
I was a little doubtful to begin with but really did enjoy it, even on a second viewing of the three available episodes, and increasingly as the series pushed at the boundaries of its premise. That the action takes place in a service framework is not exactly irrelevant, since it gives the characters something to play against. But the less the army matters, the more the humans do. Crucial to Quinn’s emotional development is Katja Vanderhoff, underplayed by the great British comic actor Catherine Tate, president of the Stroopsdorf chamber of commerce and owner of “the local brothel,” with a doctorate in “intersectional feminism in late-stage capitalism.” (“Oh, fun,” says Quinn, who has taken a shine to her.) Matter-of-fact in a way she identifies as Dutch, Katja is the series’ most plausible character; her scenes bring the show, and Leary, back to Earth.
Military comedies have a long and relatively peaceable history on screens small and large — Fred Astaire, Bob Hope, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis and Bill Murray all made them. On television we’ve had “The Phil Silvers Show” (a.k.a. “Sgt. Bilko”), “Ensign O’Toole,” “McHale’s Navy,” “MASH,” of course, descended from the Robert Altman film, and Kevin Biegel’s “Enlisted,” a Fox series from a decade back, set in a Florida-based “rear deployment unit” not a million miles from Camp Stroopsdorf.
They all counterpose the rule-makers against the rule-breakers; you can’t make a comedy in which people just follow orders, after all, and though sometimes a protagonist will learn that a little discipline is a good thing, more often the point is that too much is a bad one. I can’t say which attitude is more true to military life, but I would hazard — would hope — that hijinks and shenanigans are not unknown there.
In a year filled with quality series, these subjective choices indicate that great TV shows keep being made, even if the industry is in a bit of slump, our television critic says.
