General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Good Cop

The Good Cop is an American comedy-drama television series created by Andy Breckman for Netflix, in which a pathologically honest NYPD detective lives with and works cases alongside his disgraced, rule-breaking father, a former NYPD officer.¹ The ten-episode first season premiered on September 21, 2018, and Netflix canceled the series on November 13, 2018, after a single season.¹ It stars Tony Danza and Josh Groban and is adapted from the Israeli series HaShoter HaTov (השוטר הטוב).²

Key fact	Detail
Format	One-hour dramedy, 10 episodes, one season; TV-PG rating³^•⁴
Premiere	September 21, 2018, on Netflix¹
Creator	Andy Breckman, creator of Monk, as showrunner and executive producer²
Leads	Tony Danza as Tony Caruso Sr. ("Big Tony"); Josh Groban as Tony Caruso Jr. ("TJ")²
Origin	Inspired by the Israeli format HaShoter HaTov from production company YES, which also served as executive producer²
Cancellation	Announced by Netflix on November 13, 2018, about seven weeks after the premiere¹
Reception	Metacritic metascore 53 from 15 critics; Rotten Tomatoes 50% from 26 reviews with an 82% audience score⁴^•⁵

Spoilers

Premise and cast

Tony Danza plays Tony Caruso Sr., a lovable but not exactly honorable former NYPD officer who never followed the rules and, in the series' backstory, served a seven-year prison sentence.²^•¹ Sharing a home with him is TJ (Josh Groban), his son, an exceptionally intelligent, by-the-book NYPD detective who insists on staying within the rules as he cracks some of the hardest cases in Brooklyn.² The "odd couple" become unofficial partners, with Tony Sr. offering his overly cautious son blunt, street-wise advice on everything from handling suspects to handling women.²^•³

The supporting cast includes Monica Barbaro as Cora Vasquez, the newest detective on the All-City Homicide Task Force; Isiah Whitlock Jr. as TJ's world-weary partner Burl Loomis; and Bill Kottkamp.²^•⁶ For Danza, the role marked a return to series television and his first starring sitcom role since the late 1990s; for Groban, a singer known for his recordings, it was his first regular sitcom role.³^•⁵

Production

Netflix announced the series on June 19, 2017, describing it as a 10-episode, one-hour dramedy that would bring Danza back to series television.³ Breckman served as showrunner and executive producer alongside Randy Zisk (Bones, Monk) and Howard Klein (The Office, The Mindy Project); Zisk also directed the first episode, and Danza was a producer.²^•³ The production company was 3 Arts Entertainment.⁴

Breckman framed the show as a deliberate contrast to darker police fare: "Many cop shows feature dark and provocative material: psycho-sexual killers, twisted, grim, flawed detectives... But the show I want to produce is playful, family-friendly, and a celebration of old-fashioned puzzle-solving."³

Format and style

Each episode presents a new case, largely unconnected from the last, in a network-style procedural structure; episodes run about 44 to 48 minutes, close to the length a commercial-network show would occupy.⁷ A recurring framing device ends each story with a newspaper headline teasing the next one.⁴ Reviewers noted the show's deliberately retro feel: the A.V. Club wrote that it "doesn't feel like it was made in 2018," and Den of Geek observed that in tone, humor, plot mechanics, and running time it was nearly indistinguishable from network procedurals such as Bull.⁸^•⁷

The Israeli original

The American series adapts HaShoter HaTov (Hebrew for "The Good Cop"), an Israeli comedy produced by Yoav Gross Productions and yes TV and distributed internationally by yes Studios.⁹ The original ran for three seasons of fifteen 30-minute episodes each, in Hebrew, created and written by Erez Aviram, Tomer Aviram, and Yuval Semo.⁹ Its premise differs from the remake: policeman Danny Confino, played by Yuval Semo in the Israeli version, moves back into his parents' home after a breakup and finds that his greedy, petty family are the real "criminals" in his life.⁹ Israeli press reported that the original was considered the most successful comedy in YES's history, and that the American version budgeted roughly $5 million per episode.¹⁰

Reception and cancellation

Critical response was mixed. The most favorable major review came from Entertainment Weekly (83/100), which wrote that the show "blends the cheerful silliness of Brooklyn Nine-Nine with the tidy storytelling of Breckman's other crime comedy, Monk, and it elevates the familiar police-show formula with a strong ensemble cast."⁴ At the negative end, Variety gave 40/100, criticizing the show for reiterating its two leads as familiar personality types across ten episodes and for relying on "the utter lack of intelligence of both its two leads and everyone around them" to solve its weekly mysteries.⁴ On Metacritic the season scored 53, with 12 of 15 critic reviews in the mixed band and none negative; the user score was 6.8.⁴ Rotten Tomatoes recorded a 50% Tomatometer from 26 reviews against an 82% audience score, a gap of 32 points between critics and viewers.⁵

Netflix canceled the series on November 13, 2018, about seven weeks after the premiere. TheWrap reported that it "drew middling reviews and failed to generate much buzz among viewers upon its Sept. 21 premiere."¹ Netflix's statement thanked Breckman, the producers, writers, crew, "and especially stars Tony Danza and Josh Groban for bringing this classic odd couple father-son story to Netflix."¹ The series remains available on Netflix.¹¹

Legacy

The series was the first cop comedy-drama in the Netflix original library, and its quick cancellation became an early example of the streamer's single-season decisions on broad-appeal programming.¹² Monica Barbaro went on to star in Top Gun: Maverick (2022).¹³ The title has since been reused by an unrelated 2025 CW comedy-drama, Good Cop/Bad Cop, starring Leighton Meester, which is a separate series.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Genre and subject-scripted series › Crime, police, and detective series › American crime series › Private detective and mystery series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?