A marshal and his mastiff

The new Turner & Hooch, streaming on Disney+, continues the 1989 film starring Tom Hanks. Hanks played Scott Turner, a small-town policeman who teams up with a slobbery French mastiff. In the new series, Josh Peck plays Scott’s son (also named Scott), who is a U.S. marshal based in San Francisco.

Like his dad, Scott wants everything neat and tidy, but also like his dad, his life is thrown into chaos when he adopts an unruly dog named Hooch. The elder Turner died right before the show’s first episode, and he left his latest French mastiff to his son.

Each episode features a bad guy of the week—Scott chases bank robbers, kidnappers, and jewel thieves. Hooch keeps tripping him up, sometimes literally. A mystery also lurks in the background. Maybe Scott’s father was working on a secret investigation when he died.

Does this series live up to the 1989 movie? Josh Peck is no Tom Hanks, but the new Turner & Hooch is more family friendly. There’s gunfire, but despite the whizzing bullets, no one dies in the first four episodes. And unlike the original movie, the love story has remained chaste so far.

But the show gets a slow start as early episodes spend too much time recreating parallels with the movie. Even if this series develops some original storylines, I’m not sure it will be able to run with the big dogs.