Two men and a moustache: Masculinity, nostalgia and bromance in The Good Guys

The 2010 Fox series The Good Guys presents a replay of the buddy cop relationship that promotes male bonding while self-consciously acknowledging its homoerotic overtones. This article explores The Good Guys as a text that somewhat ambiguously promotes hybrid masculinities while reinscribing other racial and gender stereotypes. The Good Guys illustrates, and challenges, both previous and present concepts of masculine performance; at the same time, its affectionately cartoonish action-genre tropes suggest masculine wish fulfilment and nostalgia for the not-too-distant ‘good old days’ always just out of reach.