Rosewood: Series Premiere Review

By Matt Fowler

“You are a huge pain in my ass!”

Preach it, sister.

That line was shouted out by Jaina Lee Ortiz’s Detective Villa, the put-upon, at wits’ end “parter” of Miami’s most loud and irritating private pathologist, Dr. Beaumont Rosewood, Jr. – boisterously played by Morris Chestnut in FOX’s new breezy, safe medical series Rosewood (airing Wednesday, September 23rd).

There are certainly more than a few ways to package a TV medical/investigative genius type. They can be cantankerous and edgy like a House or a Sherlock. They can be withdrawn and anxious. Or they can basally be the “What About Bob?” of doctors and be so overbearing and annoying that they’re absolutely beloved by everyone except for those who have to directly work with them. And that’s the case with Rosewood. A character so aggravating that if I were a cop I’d rather see a thousand murder cases go unsolved than have to spend more than a minute with him.

And that’s how this pilot episode went for me. I found myself rooting for whoever it was that killed young Nora (this episode’s corpse) over Rosewood and his fancy lab (a meticulous, ridiculous high-tech haven that puts SHIELD’s operation to shame). I was also most certainly rooting for Rosewood’s many many ailments to take his life before the closing credits. Because that’s the hook here. Rosewood loves life because he’s on borrowed time. His laundry list of lingering illnesses make it so that the show can – sadly – last only 10 years. And he’s so in love with life that he’s determined to make everyone else hate it.

Jaina Lee Ortiz and Morris Chestnut in Rosewood.

And poor Ortiz is stuck playing the woman who has to yell at him for forty minutes, only to warm up him in the final five. Insisting that there is no “we” and that the two of them have no future as a team only to predictably eat her words later on. And while she’s presented as a strong, tough character (she boxes, breaks a suspect’s nose, etc), she also has to spend a majority of the time being wrong in the face of Rosewood’s motor-mouthed condescension. At least she’s not a bitter husk of a human like Anthony Michael Hall’s (who’s somehow morphed into George Dzundza) cop character, who’s like Sadness compared to Rosewood’s Joy – if I can go all Inside Out for a second.

When done right, an aggressively positive character can be a Chris Traeger from Parks and Recreation. Here however, Rosewood’s passive aggressive chipperness and “joie de vivre” will have you actively rooting for death and despair in any way it can present itself. This is a blunt, basic, frustratingly formulaic premiere with a premise that backfires because the main character is so grating and garish that you don’t care that he’s right about everything.