'Terriers' review: The 'Sins of the Past' come back to haunt Hank and Britt

This week’s episode of Terriers was the new series’ best hour to date. It took the oldest trick in the TV handbook — a flashback episode that showed us how our heroes arrived at the point in their lives we’re now following — and made it triumphant storytelling.

We saw the way Donal Logue’s Hank met his partner-in-private-investigation, Britt (Michael Raymond-James), three years ago. We might have guessed: Britt was a suspect, Hank was still an active cop and an active drunk, and he conducted the interrogation.

Hank may have been lacing his coffee from a flask filled with the hard stuff, much to the frustration of his then partner Mark, but he was still shrewd enough to figure out that Britt wasn’t the serial rapist the cops were seeking. It was the guy Hank really thought had committed the crimes, cocky Billy Whitman, who was the focus of Hank’s most intense questioning, and the character that sparked the flashback: Whitman, who’d known Hank’s ex-wife in college, had resurfaced and, in the present-day part of the show, prompted Hank to beg Mark to reopen the old, cold case.

This episode was written by Tim Minear (a Joss Whedon stalwart, writing and/or directing episodes of Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse) and directed by Tucker Gates, who’s done fine work on everything from The X-Files to Alias to Lost. All that skill was in evidence in this Terriers titled “Sins of the Past.”

If you’re wondering why this is my first post on Terriers — I know quite a few readers have been asking when I’d start writing about it — it’s because I haven’t been so impressed by the show that I wanted to share enthusiasm, nor so disappointed that I wanted to dole out any negative judgment. Terriers is a shaggy-dog-story show — it moves along at a pace that is intentionally aimless whenever it’s not surprisingly predictable. I say “surprisingly” simply because I’ve expected more from show creator Ted Griffin, who’s written Ocean’s Eleven, among other feature films, and producer Shawn Ryan (The Shield — ’nuff said).

I like Hank and Britt a lot when they’re together, bantering with each other and teaming up to con a suspect or solve a case. But whenever they’re apart, the clichés start. Hank’s hangdog love for his ex-wife Gretchen is unrequited romance at its most realistic — that is, obsessive to Hank and repetitious to people watching him obsess. And I was fervently hoping that once Britt learned that his girlfriend, Katie, had had a one-night stand with another guy, he wouldn’t do what thousands of hard-boiled heroes in TV shows, movies, and books have done before, which is to up and leave, and then wallow in self-pity. Which is what Britt did.

I know there’s an excellent show at the heart of Terriers. I just wish it expressed its heart via its head more often, with sharper dialogue for any characters who aren’t named Hank or Britt, and with the sort of plot turns we were treated to in this week’s very fine episode.

There are two more episodes in Terriers‘ first season; I hope FX renews it, so the show can demonstrate where it’s going and proves with more consistency what it can do.

So let’s hear it, Terriers fans. What do you think?

Twitter: @kentucker