Review: ‘NCIS: New Orleans’ follows familiar path with a Big Easy accent

You have heard perhaps that we are in a Triple-Platinum Age of Television, where the new standard is the high standard. But if the actual measured preferences of the world are anything to go by, there is a place in it for less-than-great TV — shows made not to push an envelope or blow your mind, but only to move you smoothly from A to B, and maybe to C, with some stimulating scenery along the way.

So it is with CBS’ “NCIS,” the most-watched drama in America and the world. Nothing succeeding like success, the series gave birth to “NCIS: Los Angeles” in 2009 and now to “NCIS: New Orleans,” which starts Tuesday, directly following the mothership’s 11th-season premiere.

The characters and setting were introduced in a pair of “NCIS” episodes from late last season. (“NCIS” regular David McCallum makes a teleconferenced cameo in the “New Orleans” premiere.) They come with easy-to-read quirks and attitudes. At some time in the future — and a future seems assured — the characters and the people who play them will have acquired shared histories that inform the way viewers view them. And for all the visible seams of its construction, the thing will become real.

Scott Bakula, in the virile older-dude mold of “NCIS” team leader Mark Harmon, leads the team this time, as Special Agent Dwayne Pride, “beloved from Bourbon Street to the swamps.” He also makes a mean gumbo, if he does say so himself, and plays a little jazz piano.

Rounding out the team are agents Christopher LaSalle (Lucas Black) and “recent Midwest transplant” Meredith Brody (Zoe McClellan), abetted by a pair of consulting coroners, played by C.C.H. Pounder, the only African American regular cast member of a series set in New Orleans, and Rob Kerkovich, the designated geek-nerd.

Although we are seeing real pictures of New Orleans, the view feels touristic; even when Pride describes the city’s neighborhoods for Brody (Uptown equals “$600 strollers and organic everything,” Bywater is “neck beards, thick-rimmed glasses, fixed-gear bikes”), it has the feeling of being copied out of the pages of a guidebook.

There is due reference made to hurricanes (the drink, the weather), beignets, Magazine Street and Lake Pontchartrain. Pride, who is separated from his wife and sleeping in his office — the usual big space, with the usual big screens, set in the French Quarter for color — cooks a breakfast of “eggs Creole, andouille sausage, remoulade sauce” from the “On the Nose Cookbook.” (At one point, he actually whistles “When the Saints Come Marching In.”) But nothing here feels as authentically Southern as Black’s Alabamian accent, which is, indeed, his own.

The plot of the pilot, which begins with the discovery of a severed leg in a load of shrimp, is clever enough and manages to fit a lot of locations into its 40-minute hour. That time is also filled with cornball dialogue, shameless sentimentality and B-movie displays of toughness — the agents muscling their way around town, barking “NCIS!” as if that would mean anything to a person not conversant with the TV series.

I understand that this is basic to the attraction. There are no moral uncertainties here. The good guys are clearly good, though some of them may be a little strange; the bad guys are inherently bad, though some of them present well.

The world is in chaos, these shows say, but we are here that you may rest easy, now thrice weekly.

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‘NCIS: New Orleans’

Where: CBS

When: 9 p.m. Tuesday

Rating: TV-PG-LV (may be unsuitable for young children with advisories for coarse language and violence)