Hauppauge's Lori Loughlin plays against type in new police drama 'On Call'

In a hard-edge departure from her best-known roles, Hauppauge-raised Lori Loughlin plays an efficiently no-nonsense police lieutenant in the new Prime Video series "On Call," a half-hour procedural drama from "Law & Order" impresario Dick Wolf. The show, Wolf Entertainment’s first scripted streaming series, premieres early Thursday.

"Lt. Bishop is a very different role for me," former "Full House" and "When Calls the Heart" star Loughlin, 60, says in a Zoom interview with her and Eriq La Salle ("ER"), who plays the recurring role of Sgt. Lasman and also is an executive producer of the show. “On Call” delves into the lives of beat cops in Long Beach, California, a predominantly Hispanic city about 24 miles south of Los Angeles with a high poverty rate.

"Eriq was instrumental in bringing me onboard," Loughlin says. "Because it was a different kind of role [for me], I had some reservations. I was a little bit timid." She credits La Salle, who directed four of the show’s eight episodes, "for guiding me and helping me develop the character and pushing me outside my comfort zone."

"Lori and I worked together back in the early ’90s and I had a great time with her," says La Salle, 62. In the 1993 ABC telefilm "Empty Cradle," Loughlin played a woman whose infant was stolen by a hospital nurse who manipulated records to make it seem as if the baby had been stillborn. La Salle played a detective who suspected the nurse of a related murder.

"Everyone has their favorite sense of Lori — girl next door, sweetheart," he says. "But I know as an actor how important it is for us to feed other parts of ourselves. People want to typecast you. And so when we started having [casting] discussions" with series co-creators Tim Walsh and Elliot Wolf, Dick Wolf’s son, "we had the typical people that would be playing these roles, and I said, ‘Listen, we know what we're going to get from them and it's going to be fine. It's going to be serviceable. It's going to be good. But this wild card that I think Lori can bring can actually give us more than that.’ "

Loughlin’s Lt. Bishop presides over a precinct of mostly jaded cops all too familiar with the usual suspects in their small city. The show focuses on veteran Officer Traci Harmon (Troian Bellisario), who is training rookie Alex Diaz (Brandon Larracuente). Loughlin, who appears in five episodes, plays their commanding officer with a professionally polite yet almost impatient edge born of having seen the same scenarios play out over and over through the years. She’s seen it all, and just wants to get on with it.

La Salle, she says, counseled her that Bishop "is unapologetic, a leader and we need to see that strength. But then there are layers, so she isn't just a one-dimensional [hard case]. She has motive, she does care. Her heart is in the right place."

Indeed, Bishop — a name with religious connotations — seems to be the stern but benevolent deity watching over creation as Harmon, with a moral code, and Lasman, who complains about "woke" policing and longs for the old days, are the angel and devil on Diaz’s shoulders, each trying to turn him toward their path.

La Salle strongly disagrees. "I think that's reductive," he says. "The success of the show is in showing there are no full angels and no full demons. And I think that if —"

"Just humans," Loughlin softly interjects.

"Just humans," La Salle repeats contemplatively. "For me it is really about just showing flawed characters. None of us are perfect in the show. None of us are all demons."