Review: Army comedy pushes genre’s boundaries

“Going Dutch” is a contemporary military workplace family comedy, not necessarily in that adjectival order.

Denis Leary, with a distracting dye job, plays self-important Army Col. Patrick Quinn, who gets assigned to a base in the Netherlands described as “the least important U.S. Army base in the world.” His duties involve laundry, cheese-making and something to do with bowling.

The viewer might think that you could do worse than spend your enlistment working in a fromagerie. But Quinn, whose puffed-out chest can barely contain all the ribbons and medals pasted to it, is not happy.

The base’s lack of discipline — nobody salutes, but they might wave — offends his aggressive sense of order, readiness and army life. He becomes even unhappier when he discovers that his estranged daughter, Capt. Maggie Quinn (Taylor Misiak), is in charge of the post as interim commander. They have issues, amplified by having not seen one another in many years and Quinn’s not wanting to admit they have them.

His devoted executive officer, Maj. Abraham Shah (Danny Pudi, nice to see) is quickly seen to be developing a crush on Maggie. On her side of the seesaw are Laci Mosley as Sgt. Dana Conway, who can source anything, anyhow, and keeps a closetful of things she shouldn’t have; nervous Pvt. “B.A.” Chapman (Dempsey Bryk), and IT genius Corp. Elias Papadakis (Hal Cumpston).

Created by Joel Church-Cooper (“Brockmire”), the show is essentially conventional and can be more than a bit silly. But the series increasingly pushes at the boundaries of its premise. That the action takes place in a service framework is not exactly irrelevant, because it gives the characters something to play against. But the less the army matters, the more the humans do.

Crucial to Quinn’s emotional development is Katja Vanderhoff, underplayed by the great British comic actor Catherine Tate, president of the Stroopsdorf chamber of commerce and owner of the local brothel, with a doctorate in “intersectional feminism in late-stage capitalism.” (“Oh, fun,” says Quinn, who has taken a shine to her.) Matter-of-fact in a way she identifies as Dutch, Katja is the series’ most plausible character; her scenes bring the show, and Leary, back to Earth.

Military comedies have a long and relatively peaceable history on screens small and large — Fred Astaire, Bob Hope, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis and Bill Murray all made them. On television we’ve had “The Phil Silvers Show” (aka “Sgt. Bilko”), “Ensign O’Toole,” “McHale’s Navy,“ ”M.A.S.H.,” of course, and “Enlisted,” a series from a decade back, set in a Florida-based “rear deployment unit” not a million miles from Camp Stroopsdorf.

They all counterpose the rule-makers against the rule-breakers; you can’t make a comedy in which people just follow orders, after all, and though sometimes a protagonist will learn that a little discipline is a good thing, more often the point is that too much is a bad one.

I can’t say which attitude is more true to military life, but I would hazard — would hope — that high jinks and shenanigans are not unknown there.

Rating: TV-14

How to watch: 8:30 p.m. Thursdays on Fox