Probably no single profession has been more analyzed, mythologized, deconstructed, vilified, or venerated by TV and the movies than that of the Big City Cop. In the late 60s and 70s, with Vietnam and civil rights and Watergate causing Americans to look at virtually every aspect of government with growing skepticism, fictitious portrayals of lawmen darkened to suit the times. The best modern dramatizations of police work focus on its endless potential to corrupt those who practice it (The Shield) or its frequent tedium and futility (The Wire).

Which brings us to Cops, American Century Theatre’s earnest, well-mounted, nicely-acted production of Terry Curtis Fox’s 1976 off-Broadway police play. It would be very easy for this allegedly gritty and certainly profane pastiche to have come out resembling the Max Fischer Players‘ production of Serpico, as seen all-too-briefly in Rushmore. But it ducks that with strong performances and high production values. Brian Razzino and Regen Wilson, as a pair of waitress-abusing Chicago detectives on the night shift, are both first-rate. The brio they bring to their roles isn’t surprising — what actor doesn’t want to wear a gun and a badge and swagger around talking with a Chicago accent? — but they’re committed, funny, and believable. And the gunplay — I hope I’m not giving too much away by noting there’s more than a little of it — is visceral and convincing.

Shame about the play, though.

Really, it’s more like a skit. There’s less going on here than in a typical episode of NYPD Blue even in one of its lame later seasons. Dennis Franz, who emerged as the real star of that long-lived TV show while a parade of better-looking leading men came and went, starred with Joe Mantegna in the original 1976 production of Cops at Chicago’s Organic Theatre Company. Later, he had a long run on Hill Street Blues, the celebrated 80s TV police drama on which Fox worked as a story editor. (Fox now blogs for The Huffington Post.)

It’s clear from ACT Artistic Director Jack Marshall’s program notes that he considers Cops to be a watershed moment in the progression of police drama from the foursquare clarity of Dragnet to the moral vagaries of The Shield. We say: Come on, now. Cops takes the attitude and the wardrobe and the lingo of other, better, police stories, but none of the ideas. None of the hard choices that police work, at least according to its more thorough fictional portrayals, really involves. So little actually happens in this show that even the most threadbare synopsis would constitute major spoilerage, so out of respect to the director and performers, who have done their jobs honorably and well, we’ll say only that it’s set in an all-night diner.

PICTURED: Brian Razzino, John Bailey, and Regan Wilson in American Century Theatre’s Cops.