ABC's Stumptown should really be called "Cobie Smulders Town"

The A.V. Club

"Stumptown’s primary appeal isn’t as a crime drama. It’s as a Cobie Smulders vehicle—and in that respect, it’s everything it needs to be," says Allison Shoemaker of the graphic novel-based ABC P.I. drama. "Giving a great actor a great part isn’t enough to make a great story, but it sure helps things along, and in Smulders and Dex Parios, such a match has been made." Shoemaker adds: "Sideways seems to be Dex’s general direction, but Smulders, who’s very good at this whole acting thing, doesn’t play the distress and dysfunction. She plays the disguise, the coping mechanisms, the play-acting of a person who is normally very good about hiding how hurt, afraid, or filled with rage she might be. Like all great P.I.s in fiction, language does a lot of the work."

ALSO:

• Stumptown immediately looks and feels different than a typically sterile network drama: "Giving the show its own restless and grim visual language that mirrors the graphic novel’s own is a quick and smart way to establish Stumptown as its own animal," says Caroline Framke, adding: "As seen on How I Met Your Mother and beyond, Smulders is an extremely sharp and capable performer who’s especially good at finding humor in characters who take themselves just a little too seriously. Watching her whale on petty crime jerks who never see it coming is genuinely satisfying."
• What's great about Stumptown is how fun it is to watch: "What Stumptown is good at (likely due to its rich source material)," says Pilot Viruet, "is immediately characterizing Dex without wasting a lot of time on verbal and on-the-nose exposition."
• Smulders' Dex is a character that looks like it will have network staying power
• Stumptown may not be important TV, but it's important for network TV because it provides first-rate escapism
• If Stumptown is going to continue beating the odds as something more than an average network drama, it needs to let Smulders be sarcastic and kick-ass as much as possible
• Jake Johnson admits his Stumptown character starts off similar to New Girl's Nick Miller, but promises that will change
• Cobie Smulders was drawn to Stumptown because Dex Parios is hard to describe: "She’s a bit of a mash of everything: she’s very funny, she’s very closed off, she’s very determined, she’s very flighty, she comes from this tough military background, and she’s unable to hold down anything steady, yet she has this big responsibility of taking care of her younger brother," she says. "It’s this messy person who drinks and gambles too much and is not going to show up all the time, but at the same time, she’s inherently good and wants to help others and is quite righteous. It’s exciting to play a fully realized woman, and not just a couple shades of a character."