What if Blue Bloods met Parenthood on the set of an Angel Studios production? That’s generally the gist of Line of Fire, NBC’s first pilot of the 2026-27 broadcast television season, a new hour-long drama from Joshua Safran (whose credits include Smash and both versions of Gossip Girl) that is a classic example of a series that is suggestively less than the sum of its creative parts. Boasting an insanely talented cast – led by Peter Krause, Hope Davis, Kat Cunning, and Charlie Barnett – Line of Fire is a weird mix of family melodrama and cop procedural that, despite its many attempts to layer on mystery and intrigue, suffers from a particularly lifeless, uninspired delivery, and a lack of characters interesting or defined enough to suggest investing in.
Loosely – and boy, do I mean “loosely” – based on the life experience of executive producer Jenna Bush Hager (yup, you heard that right), Line of Fire‘s first hour opens in media res on a US Marshal chasing down a fugitive, before both are shot by a mysterious figure – which in turn leads both the FBI and the US Marshals to descend upon the scene, where we begin to meet the Hollingsworth family at the center of the show’s story. The entire family – patriarchs Mike and Jane, and their children Micah, Russ, and Clare – is all introduced with actual title cards, as delivering that information through dialogue and visuals would take up time, time apparently better served with Line of Fire‘s strange amalgamation of Case of the Week frameworks and serialized family-based narratives, all of which conflate to occur on the week of Mike’s retirement from the Secret Service (where his son Micah also works, and is banging the president’s college-aged daughter recklessly behind everyone’s back, which… yeah, that feels weird).
“Pilot”, surprisingly, isn’t led by Krause’s Michael, who mostly is a listless fatherly presence in an episode with too many plots and overlapping dialogues to ever center itself on what kind of agent and father he is (except one who can’t let go of an old, unsolved assassination attempt, because all five main characters need their own mystery plot!). What we do know is that Michael has absolutely used his position and influence to put his family into positions of power in federal agencies all around him; he’s got a nepo baby son working for him and not taking the job seriously, a daughter who is an FBI agent so obsessed with her work it is literally the only thing she talks about for the 42-minute pilot, and another son who works for the Department of Justice (where Mike has him secretly hunting down clues for his unsolved assassination attempt, of course), with the disturbing, expressed family ethos of how they are “superheroes doing the Lord’s work” (yes, that is an actual line of dialogue in the episode… not at all unsettling!).
It would be one thing if Line of Fire‘s pilot struggled to make the US Marshal (where Jane is in some vaguely important position), FBI, and Secret Service stories all compelling in isolation; after all, a 42-minute pilot does not leave a lot of room to give so many different setting pathos and personality. But where “Pilot” falls short is when it puts the entire family together (ostensibly for the first time in years, though nobody acts like it), and the episode devolves into a bunch of isolated conversations that the episode is frantically cutting between. By the time the family sits down to dinner and the emotional family conflicts begin bubbling to the surface, Line of Fire is already trying to keep a half-dozen different plots and interpersonal conflicts, none of which have any sort of narrative or emotional foundation built under them, spinning in concert with each other. The result is a disjointed mess of bad stories and characters whose intentions are never clearly defined – except Clare, whose obsessive, savant-like ability to accurately predict the circumstances of the murder seen in the first scene after seeing precisely two clues takes up so much space and energy, it drowns out the other two siblings and anything going on around them.
And then, “Pilot” has to layer on a couple additional twists at the end of its first episode, both of which are presumably the real hooks of the show’s serialized elements, an attempt to marry together the family’s dynamic with the central mystery of the show – and despite how much I like the actors involved, the pilot never lets them escape the narrow dimensions of the script, which makes for a bunch of uninteresting, clockwork-like performances that are neither compelling nor unique in their presentation. Line of Fire‘s first hour begs for some directorial panache, or some personality that is something other than “do cop job” and “have complicated romantic entanglement” – for a series attempting with such ambition to stuff so many different subgenres into a single show, the factory-like delivery of the first episode is not particularly encouraging.
With some serious streamlining of its stories, Line of Fire could potentially give itself the room it needs to make either its characters or its already-convoluted narrative more engaging and driven, and try to resolve the many unanswered “whys” that lie at the center of its first episode. In its current form, Line of Fire is an almost-dystopian mix of turn-of-the-century The CW family drama, with all the Chicago franchises shoved on top – with an underlying streak of Christian righteousness that is not consistent, but sticks out like a sore thumb whenever it begins to surface.
Other thoughts/observations:
- Does Peter Krause look like he’s even having fun here? After eight years doing 9-1-1 (where his character died praying while his body was eaten alive by a virus… also strange!), it’s certainly disappointing to see him typecast in another procedural like this. I’m just saying, I’ll write a third season of Sports Night if we can get him away from Line of Fire.
- Still can’t believe how little this episode tries to make Micah a compelling character; he spends the entire hour trying to blackmail civilians so he doesn’t get caught banging the First Daughter. Who is a college student. What the fuck?
- Spoilers for the pilot’s big plot twist: ok, so their PTSD-riddled son they’ve tried to erase from the family is alive, and kills Clare’s recent ex-boyfriend (after he strangely decides to walk back into their dark house hours after the aborted family dinner ends? Make it make sense) in the final minute. There is suggestion Clare’s boyfriend was not who he said he is, so I’m assuming this is some secret plot where he’s really “protecting” the family, rather than being part of whatever central mystery is forming around the dead, rogue US Marshal named Libby.
- The President will be played by Sam Waterston, so… there’s that to look forward to, I guess!
- Clare suggests the Hollingsworth family are bad people who prioritize “self-preservation at all costs”… so why should I care about the family unit?
- Fun fact: “Pilot” was directed by Rebecca Thomas, whose credits include directing the infamous Stranger Things 2 episode, “Chapter Seven: The Lost Sister”.