Genre Boxing: CBS’ Madam Secretary and Battle Creek

At their core, Madam Secretary—the first new CBS series of the series, debuting on Sunday night—and Battle Creek fit into fairly standard genre boxes.

Madam Secretary is a workplace drama that happens to be set in the State Department, while Battle Creek is a police procedural that happens to be set in a small city instead of a big one. Those inflections are important, certainly, but neither show indicates a significant departure from the generic center.

This is typical of CBS dramas: even The Good Wife, the broadcast drama most often mentioned in conversations about the battle against cable, relies heavily on both workplace drama and legal procedural to plot its episodic and serial storylines. But Madam Secretary and Battle Creek are not as similar to each other when we consider what efforts have been taken beyond those generic centers, where Madam Secretary is much more invested in the lure of the serial in mapping out its story.

Without going too deep into spoilers, Madam Secretary isn’t about Elizabeth McCord being appointed to the position of Secretary of State under normal circumstances; the previous Secretary of State has died, which means she’s inheriting the staff and all of the drama that comes with it. Some of this is workplace awkwardness: Elizabeth did not hire these people, and is an unseasoned politician. However, some of this is also the fact the Secretary of State died under mysterious circumstances, laying the groundwork for a larger conspiracy storyline reverberating throughout the season.

When I asked showrunner Barbara Hall about this, she said “I thought it might be an extra conflict or challenge for her to step into a situation where the person she’s replacing might have actually been involved in something that’s untoward and that the tentacles of that may affect her for a long time. So it’s just another element that it’s hard enough for her to step into this job, but know she’s stepped into it and she’s got unravel some seeds that were planted before she got there.”

She also admitted that some of this instinct came from her previous job working in cable. Madam Secretary already has three elements at play: the day-to-day workplace drama, the family drama about McCord’s husband and two teenage children (who will all be adjusting to political life), and the political drama about the global politics the Secretary of State must face. The show—which is a sturdy procedural with strong perofrmances—doesn’t feel like it really needs a fourth element, but Hall admits that she “had just worked on Homeland the year before, and I had gotten accustomed to getting into these international stories and finding there’s always an extra element when you start lifting up these rocks and looking under what’s going on in terms of the national diplomacy.” Hall also revealed plans to delve into McCord’s past with the CIA, another remnant of her time on Homeland, and something that a more basic version of this show wouldn’t explore.

These are also elements that aren’t present on Battle Creek, by comparison. In this case, although creator Vince Gilligan—who is stepping aside to let showrunner David Shore take over—is known for his heavily serialized work on Breaking Bad, this script is over a decade old, and it bears the marks of its age in its lack of serial pretensions. It’s a simple setup, about a local detective and a newly-arrived FBI agent who butt heads as they confront the criminal element in Battle Creek, Michigan. And that’s really the show, honestly. There are shades of dark pasts for both Agnew (Dean Winters) and Chamberlain (Josh Duhamel), but the pilot doesn’t lean too heavily on them. There’s simply an ongoing conflict between their philosophies, which will play out as they need to work together to ensure they can do their job and keep Battle Creek safe.

It’s as classic a police procedural as you’re going to see. The setting is its biggest point of differentiation, with everything else focused on execution as opposed to a groundbreaking new premise, a deep mythology, or another “additive” to set the show apart. Speaking to the series’ willingness to engage with comedy, producer David Shore argues “the humor…comes from the fact that it is different from other cop shows. It is the center of a small town. We want to tell small town versions of big-city stories…We want to play with what you’ve seen on TV—you think you know what’s coming, and then we do it completely differently because it’s Battle Creek.” And yet this difference isn’t articulated in the pilot beyond subtle character beats, at least compared to Madam Secretary’s insistence that there’s more to this story than meets the eye with its mythology. It’s one of the reasons why Battle Creek—despite being a “better” show than Stalker or Scorpion (the latter of which I think is solid)—probably isn’t on the fall schedule: whereas Madam Secretary is an obvious thematic fit with The Good Wife, Battle Creek isn’t an obvious fit for anything, even if it could conceivably fit with a large number of shows on CBS’ lineup. It bears the mark of the fact it was developed over a decade ago, and the fact that it seemed even then to be conspicuously constructed as a throwback to a simpler kind of cop show.

It’s a sign of confidence that CBS would launch in the fall with Madam Secretary, but it’s equally a sign of confidence that Battle Creek made an appearance at Summer Press Tour as a key lynchpin of CBS’ 2014-15 lineup despite having no airdate. CBS is leaving a lot of drama to midseason this year, but we live in an era where that’s not necessarily a bad sign.

Madam Secretary debuts at 8:30/7:30c/8:00p on Sunday September 21, while Battle Creek debuts sometime in early 2015.