Leighton Meester in The CW Police Dramedy

Early in The CW’s Good Cop/Bad Cop, police chief Hank Hickman (Clancy Brown) and his daughter, detective Lou (Leighton Meester), have a disagreement about what the department’s top priority ought to be. She, reasonably, believes it should be protecting the community by investigating crimes. Hank, however, has other ideas.

“The country is falling apart. People need a place where they feel safe,” he says. To him, what matters is that they’re able to make the community think they’re secure: “Belief is the most important thing we can give them.” And while Lou is correct in every practical real-world sense, it’s Hank who has his own series exactly right.

The country does seem like it’s falling apart. We do need a place to feel safe. And a thoroughly charming procedural on The CW might be as good a way as any to indulge in that fantasy — even if it is, in the end, just one big fiction.

Everything about Good Cop/Bad Cop is designed to conjure that sunny, cozy mood, starting with its setting. Eden Vale, Washington, is the sort of solidly middle-class, carefully diverse, generally happy small town that probably only really exists in TV shows but tends to drive a whole lot of them, from Gilmore Girls to Schitt’s Creek to Resident Alien. (Less so Fox’s comparatively gray and chilly Murder in a Small Town.) Everyone in its population of 9,347 — “soon to be 9,346,” promises a caption right before the first mystery — knows each other and basically gets along with each other, except when it’s more convenient for the plot that they don’t.

Within that bubble, creator John Quaintance focuses on a particularly close-knit unit. In the mold of every police procedural ever, the narrative is built around an odd-couple crime-solving duo. Lou is “the normal one,” tough enough to aim a rifle with the best of them but savvy enough to know that sometimes the best way to get a perp talking is to cheerfully suggest that they call up his mom. Her new partner is her younger brother, Henry (Luke Cook), just moved back from Seattle. He’s the Sherlockian half of the pair, possessed of a decent heart and a sharp mind but also (as one would-be employer puts it) serial-killer-level social skills.

Good Cop/Bad Cop would surely be the first to admit it’s not reinventing the wheel. The dramedy wears its detective influences on its sleeve, name-checking the likes of Knives Out and Vertigo and going out of its way for a brief Twin Peaks field trip. Its own take on the genre is breezy and mostly low-stakes; even the deadly shootout that opens the pilot is prefaced by some fizzy, funny banter over whether a hockey mask disguise reads more Heat or Friday the 13th. Quaintance, whose recent credits include Hulu’s very amiable Reboot, first conceived of the new show years ago as a USA project, and it’s easy to imagine it fitting right in alongside Psych or Monk in the network’s “blue sky” era.

But its special sauce — the thing that elevates it beyond the kind of algorithmic programming you might stumble onto and then forget about, and into the sort of reliable escape you might turn into a weekly habit — is the chemistry of its lead cast.

The most obvious standout is Cook, who combines the square-jawed looks of a superhero with the crackerjack comic timing and nimble facial expressions of an Alan Tudyk character. But Meester is no less winning as laid-back Lou, lending the series a congeniality to balance out Henry’s awkwardness. The pair settle right away into the half-affectionate, half-annoyed, goofy childish dynamic recognizable to adult siblings everywhere — to the amusement and occasional irritation of Frank, a locally beloved good old boy who’s only the teeny-tiniest bit prone to vanity and corruption.

The ensemble around them are less fleshed-out to start, but it’s a testament to Quaintance’s gift for creating immediately distinctive characters that that’s hardly a drawback. It just means there’s more room for us to keep getting to know offbeat locals like sheriff Carson (Devon Terrell), a handsome divorcé who writes adorably dorky fantasy novels in his free time, or Nadia (Blazey Best), the cop-show-loving Russian who admiringly describes her boyfriend Hank as “Detective Olivia Benson inside body of handsome man.”

To Hank’s own point, it all feels very safe — in a good way, or at least a purposeful one. It’s not so airless that it completely ignores real societal ills. One episode has a pharmacist summarizing the past decade as “recession, pandemic, people losing their jobs, their health insurance and now I get robbed twice in the same day,” while others take shots at crypto, or the lurid tenor of true-crime reporting, or Hank’s not-entirely-helpful methods of massaging his office’s statistics. Mostly, though, the series treats the sorts of big, heavy, complex issues plaguing our world as waves crashing in the distance. Their currents might reach Eden Vale eventually, but by then they won’t be much more than splashing foam.

It seems as if nothing truly bad could ever happen in this town — and aside from the plot-driving deaths of a few people we’re not going to miss, nothing truly bad really does in the six episodes sent to critics. There’s enough lawbreaking to keep Lou and Henry busy trying to work out who might have poisoned an insufferable tech bro or kidnapped a talentless aspiring actress. But there’s not so much of it that the department cannot devote half of its tiny force to investigating the theft of a few hundred bucks from the donation bowl at a charity event, hosted by Hank to burnish his own reputation as a do-gooder.

In lieu of high-octane thrills or biting social commentary, Good Cop/Bad Cop offers a steady, approachable warmth. It’s a given that a show about a family learning to work together will lead to big fuzzy emotions at some point, particularly once you notice that Mama Hickman is conspicuously out of the picture. But it leads first with humor, endearing us to the Hickmans through their playful banter or to Eden Vale through its quirky residents and their slightly bizarre problems — and only gradually building toward more sentimental or potentially darker storylines once it knows it’s earned our affection and our trust.

It’s a smart choice that keeps the show sturdy and balanced, that keeps it from tipping too far in the direction of twee comedy or sappy drama, sour scares or clunky moralizing. Come to think of it, the show’s tonal approach is a lot like the Hickmans themselves: a bunch of different vibes that add up, improbably, to a pretty effective way of making you feel both comfortable and comforted.