Hot-shot negotiators keep the drama at home

“Standoff” Starring: Ron Livingston, Rosemarie DeWitt, Gina Torres, and Raquel Alessi… “Standoff” Starring: Ron Livingston, Rosemarie DeWitt, Gina Torres, and Raquel Alessi Tuesdays, 9 p.m. Fox

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A TV actor holds his children at gunpoint in his car. A hostage negotiator tries to calm him down. Snipers train their guns on the vehicle. Just as the actor is about to lose control and the snipers prepare to fire, the negotiator neutralizes the situation by announcing to the actor that he’s having sex with his partner.

So begins Fox’s new cleverly written, dual-storyline hostage drama, “Standoff.” The show, much like “Grey’s Anatomy,” complicates a high-stress job with forbidden relationships and humor.

“Standoff” tries to blend serial and procedural dramas together, but ends up with two well-written but completely separate shows, leaving “Standoff” slightly unbalanced and a little confused.

One part of “Standoff” attempts to set up a love affair that viewers will root for. It’s moderately successful, but only because the two leads have arguably the best chemistry on television.

Ron Livingston (“Office Space”) and Rosemarie DeWitt (“Cinderella Man”) star as the top hostage negotiation team in a place where high-profile hostage situations seem to run rampant.

After all their coworkers hear that they’re dating, agents Matt Flannery and Emily Lehman’s boss calls them into her office to discuss their “situation.” What starts as casually discussing their relationship with their boss turns into a restrained, coded breakup.

While that scene was the highlight of the pilot, unfortunately it didn’t mean anything – within fifteen minutes they were at the hotel across the street making out in the lobby. This may be an attempt to distance “Standoff” from Fox’s other hit show, “Bones.”

“Bones” has a similar theme – male/female workplace sexual tension – but the two leads are oblivious to their obvious chemistry. Both shows have the back and forth comedic bantering, but “Bones” is usually about work-related issues, while the main characters in “Standoff” bicker about the status of their relationship when they’re not on the job.

The problem facing the series is that instead of setting up the effective will-they-or-won’t-they scenario, they’re now in a will-they-or-won’t-they-this-episode situation. This is a new twist on a classic formula, but usually when characters who are meant to be together get together, viewers lose interest (Niles and Daphne on “Frasier”).

Further complicating the love-story aspect of the show is the fact that the characters are able to leave their personal lives at home. While this is comforting, since they’re dealing with delicate hostage negotiations, it isn’t compelling.

The second episode plays much like the first, with the two lead characters deciding to date, and debating whether or not to tell the boss. If the breakup would have lasted for at least a couple of episodes, or perhaps the season, the show could feed off the sexual tension at which the two stars excel.

“Standoff” does succeed in transitioning between the comedic aspects of this relationship and the seriousness of the hostage scenes, but blending the two together would have been a better route to take.

The pilot episode featured two “standoffs,” which seemed a bit much for a two-day time period. Both scenes were genuinely suspenseful, mostly because the writers take a somewhat sympathetic view to the hostage-takers.

In the second scene, the hostage-taker is a young man with a troubled past, not some crazy guy who snaps and wants to kill a bunch of people. By effectively creating back stories, “Standoff” not only makes viewers care about the hostage situations more, it also gives the hostage negotiator’s job more meaning. Without the humanity element, viewers would just root for the snipers to take the shot, which would suck all the suspense out of the show.

While the romance aspect is ill-conceived, “Standoff” still stands out from most cop shows by taking a closer look at the criminals. The show adds more depth and character to the agents handling the situations and simultaneously introduces the comedy that is missing from a lot of the procedurals on the air.

If you like a little witty banter with your cop shows, watch “Standoff” Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on Fox.