The Pitch
It's the NCIS franchise's first passport stamp: an Aussie-American joint task force in Sydney, created by Morgan O'Neill with Shane Brennan (the guy behind NCIS: LA) executive producing. Olivia Swann plays Special Agent Michelle Mackey, a hard-charging American parachuted in to run the unit. Todd Lasance is her AFP counterpart Sergeant JD Dempsey, permanently annoyed about it. Sean Sagar, Tuuli Narkle, Mavournee Hazel and William McInnes round out the squad. Early episodes set up a case-of-the-week rhythm with a light geopolitical wrapper — Chinese subs off the coast, dead Marines, the AFP and NCIS learning to share a coffee machine.
In Its Favor
The location work is a real asset. Sydney Harbour is doing heavy lifting the writing isn't, and cinematographer-friendly light gives every establishing shot a postcard glow. Todd Lasance is genuinely good — he plays JD with a bruised, prickly quality that lands whenever the script lets him shut up. William McInnes brings his usual dry command to the pathologist scenes. Olivia Swann is charismatic on camera, and when Mackey isn't being asked to state her thesis aloud, Swann suggests a much sharper show hiding underneath. The action beats are staged competently by Australian directors who understand that a foot chase down a wharf is more fun than another interrogation room.
What It Gets Wrong
The dialogue. Almost everyone speaks in placards. Motivations are announced, backstories are summarized, and the American-vs-Australian friction gets litigated in the kind of speeches that would embarrass a first-draft pilot. The procedural mechanics are boilerplate Brennan — clue, banter, montage, arrest — and the "joint task force" premise, which should generate real institutional comedy, mostly produces people explaining jurisdictional protocol to each other for exposition's sake. Blue and Evie, the two most promising characters on paper, get stranded in quirky-sidekick mode. Every emotional beat is telegraphed a scene early and then confirmed by a character saying it out loud.
Who'll Love It, Who'll Bail
If you watch NCIS, NCIS: LA, NCIS: Hawai'i, Blue Bloods, and FBI in some rotation and enjoy the comfort-food rhythm of a closed case at the hour mark, you'll be fine here. It scratches the same itch with better weather. Fans of Australian drama with actual bite — Mystery Road, Deadloch, The Newsreader — will bounce fast. Anyone who came expecting the sunburnt strangeness a Sydney-set crime show could offer will get network gloss instead.
The Sentence
SLOP isn't a moral judgment, it's a craft one, and this is a craft problem. The verdict blurb nailed it: characters keep announcing what they want, why they want it, and what they're about to do. That's a writers' room hedging against a broad international audience, terrified viewers won't follow along, so it hands everyone a megaphone. There's no thematic sermon here — it's not that kind of show — but the dialogue has the same disease a preachy show has, which is distrust of the audience. Swann and Lasance are working overtime to sell lines that were written to be understood, not spoken. The result is a series that plays fine as background, dies on inspection, and keeps getting renewed because Paramount+ needs content in this hemisphere. Watch something else.