Ben McKenzie, left, as rookie Ben Sherman and Michael Cudlitz as veteran John Cooper in a scene from the new cop drama Southland. (CTV)

When Det. Jimmy McNulty drove up the I-95 in the series finale of The Wire in 2008, he left the fate of the TV police procedural hanging in his wake. After the dizzying highs and despairing lows of the HBO show's hyperrealist, multi-season story arcs, where could cop dramas possibly go?

After the dizzying highs and despairing lows of The Wire, where could cop dramas possibly go?

Flipping around the dial these days, the answer seems almost as grim as The Wire's depiction of life in Baltimore. Viewers seeking compelling stories of the boys (and girls) in blue have uninspired material to choose from – there's the titillating, another-dead-hooker plotlines of the CSI franchise or shows where crimes take a backseat to the quirks of the sleuth (Medium, Lie to Me, The Mentalist). When even the reliable Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has traded its street cred for brazenly sensational cases, it's enough to make you want to pronounce the entire genre DOA.

Alas, the police beat always goes on, and two new shows are attempting to inject life into the shell-shocked cop procedural. The Unusuals, which airs Wednesdays, centres on Casey Shraeger (Amber Tamblyn), a no-nonsense New York officer who has recently moved from vice to homicide. She's promptly paired with a partner (Jeremy Renner) who just might be a dirty cop, and who operates a greasy spoon in his off hours. Casey's other colleagues are also capital-Q quirky, especially Eric Delahoy (Adam Goldberg), whose risk-taking behaviour has raised suspicions that he's trying to die in the line of duty.

HBO's The Wire expanded the cop-show genre to deal with race, class and civic politics. (Corus Entertainment)

As the title suggests, The Unusuals aspires to be a different kind of cop drama, one where wacky humour can coexist with a high body count. (The program's website describes the series as "a modern-day M*A*S*H.") But the show's random dispatcher announcements ("Be on the lookout for a man in a hot dog costume") and a recent jokey plotline involving a cat killer feel entirely out of place with verité action sequences shot on grimy Lower East Side locations. The cast is clearly game for anything, but the abrupt tonal shifts give the impression of a show with an identity crisis.

By contrast, the Thursday-night drama Southland arrived fully formed, and made a bold impression from the outset. Set to the ominous harmonica wails of Supertramp's School, the series opens with a crime scene: a body on a stretcher, a gun on the ground, a suspect being detained and a police cruiser's red lights swirling across the crowd of onlookers. The camera finally rests on rookie cop Ben Sherman (The OC's Benjamin McKenzie), his face frozen in a harsh streetlight glare until it resembles a mug shot.

From there, the series circles back to 16 hours earlier, when Sherman began his harrowing first day with the Los Angeles Police Department, and Southland settles into a groove. The series is stylistically modern (it features bleached-out cinematography and time-shifting story structures), yet unabashedly nostalgic in its approach to storytelling and characters.

While watching the pilot, I found myself fondly remembering Hill Street Blues, which set the bar for all of the police dramas that would follow. Hill Street Blues wasn't the first televised police procedural, but it broke new ground, when it debuted in 1981, for its combination of documentary-style camerawork, multiple storylines and, most importantly, its emphasis on the private lives of the characters. Episodes began with the infamous roll call ("Let's be careful out there”), and usually ended with Capt. Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti) and his public defender girlfriend, Joyce Davenport (Veronica Hamel), discussing their respective days in bed.

The original cast of Hill Street Blues, which set the bar for police shows. (NBC Television/Getty Images)

The series garnered multiple Emmys and spawned numerous successors; indeed, cop dramas dominated the airwaves for much of the next two decades. There were shows tackling feminist issues (Cagney & Lacey) and series that pushed the nudity and profanity envelope (NYPD Blue). In 1990, the original Law & Order began its impressive 19-season run (with various offshoots to follow). The first season of Homicide: Life on the Street (1993) took style and storytelling to new heights with jittery jump cuts and a 13-episode arc (involving the murder of a young girl named Adena Watson).

Though each of these shows had a distinct feel, certain themes emerged: the rookie learning the ropes from a grizzled veteran; idealistic beat officers trying to wade through bureaucratic red tape; detectives haunted by their cases; and the Sisyphean notion that a cop's work is never done – solve one case, and a new one springs up in its place. Southland has a firm understanding of these elements and borrows them without apology. When Ben Sherman is paired with a very cranky superior named John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz), the viewer is dropped into LAPD life in medias res. Some characters appear to be struggling with addiction problems (a cop drama mainstay), while others have strained marriages because of the job. There are murmurings of budget constraints and 3,000 backlogged cases.

With its retina-burning visuals and gritty, gang-fuelled storylines, Southland is clearly attempting to pick up where The Wire left off, a bold ambition for a show on network TV. Southland can't quite reach HBO's level of authenticity — for example, the profanity, bleeped out à la Cops, is slightly jarring. But its characters grabbed me from episode one, particularly Lydia Adams (Regina King), an earnest detective caring for her aging mother, and Dewey (C. Thomas Howell), a foul-mouthed cop whose crass antics suggest a misogyny that's never been fully explored in this TV genre. Unlike The Unusuals, which seems a little too impressed with its own eccentricity, Southland trusts in the retro combination of mean streets and three-dimensional characters that made the best police dramas flourish. It doesn't need gimmicks: it knows that sometimes, playing it straight is the edgiest choice of all.

The Unusuals airs Wednesdays on Global. Southland airs Thursdays on CTV.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.