There is a particular kind of television that says, essentially, What if we put an entire family of federal agents in the same house? Somewhere between Blue Bloods, and an algorithm’s idea of a sure thing, Line of Fire arrives with enough government credentials to populate a small cabinet and enough family drama to make you wonder whether anybody in Washington has ever heard of boundaries.

The Hollingsworths are the family in question, and virtually everybody has a badge, a clearance or a suspiciously important government job. Dad Mike (Peter Krause) is a retiring Secret Service agent haunted by a failed presidential assassination attempt. Mom Jane (Hope Davis), from whom he has long been separated, is involved in investigating the murder of a U.S. Marshals Service colleague. Daughter Clare (Kat Cunning) is an FBI agent whose devotion to the job leaves precious little oxygen for her romantic life. Son Micah (Tommy O'Brien) is a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the First Daughter. Youngest son Russ (Taylor Bloom) is starting at the Justice Department, where his family name immediately becomes less an advantage than a security problem.

Got all that? Good, because the show would like you to remember it.

To its credit, Line of Fire understands that dumping an entire federal directory into the viewer's lap is a dangerous way to begin a television series. The premiere moves briskly through its introductions, using onscreen labels and a family group chat to explain who everybody is and where they're punching the clock. It's efficient, if not exactly elegant. You get the impression that someone in the writers' room realized that viewers might require a white board and a fistful of colored markers to keep track of everything.

And then there is the family itself, which is clearly where Line of Fire wants to distinguish itself from its more procedural cousins. The show's real pitch isn't “What if the Reagans worked for the federal government?” so much as “What if your entire family had a security clearance and still couldn't have a normal Thanksgiving?” The Hollingsworths tease out the warmer, occasionally lighter side of the premise, and there are moments when the interpersonal stuff works.

But the machinery underneath it all is unmistakably network procedural. Jane and Clare conveniently wind up working together on successive murder investigations, allowing the show to have its family cake and eat its Case of the Week, too. The result is a series that sometimes feels caught between two incompatible ambitions: it wants the cozy familiarity of a family drama while simultaneously insisting that something terrible is happening in the shadows of the federal government.

There is something terrible happening, of course. The first episodes plant a large mystery involving a major twist, one designed to keep the Hollingsworths—and presumably the audience—digging long after the individual murders have been tidied away. It's a perfectly respectable piece of television engineering, although “respectable” is not necessarily the adjective you want attached to a thriller. The show knows how to manufacture questions. Whether it knows how to make us care about the answers is another matter.

The cast is solid, with Krause and Davis bringing some welcome adult gravity to a premise that could otherwise float away into procedural-TV abstraction. The younger actors have plenty of exposition to carry, and the supporting cast is packed with recognizable faces, including Sam Waterston, Chris Chalk, Campbell Scott and Charlie Barnett. But even good actors can only do so much when characters are being introduced primarily as occupations with feelings.

And that's ultimately the problem with Line of Fire: the premise is considerably more interesting than the execution. The idea of a family whose professional lives intersect with the highest levels of American power is loaded with possibilities—political intrigue, divided loyalties, professional ethics, family secrets, the whole paranoid American buffet. Yet the early episodes mostly settle for being a reasonably slick combination of family drama and federal procedural.

It's not bad television. That's almost the problem. There's enough competence here to keep you watching, enough mystery to make you curious and enough family friction to suggest that the show might eventually become something more distinctive. But in these opening episodes, Line of Fire feels less like a series that has found its identity than one still circling the creative runway, waving its credentials and waiting for someone to tell it what kind of show it is.

Maybe that big mystery will provide the answer. For now, though, the Hollingsworths have badges, guns, secrets and access to the president—and somehow the most dangerous thing about them remains the family group chat.