ALL the familiar props are here: the half-empty coffee pots, the battered metal desks, the caged-off evidence room, the rolls of yellow crime-scene tape. On a cold, rainy day in January, the interior of the Food and Fiber Pavilion, part of the 277-acre Fair Park complex here that houses the annual State Fair of Texas, looked like every TV police precinct you’ve ever seen.

“Dan, we got thrown off the case,” the actor Colin Hanks shouted to his co-star, Bradley Whitford, in an exasperated exchange as familiar as the surroundings.

“That’s ’cause we’re doing a good job,” Mr. Whitford yelled back.

“A good job? We broke damn near every rule the department has.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Whitford responded. “And we found the bad guys.”

That we’ve seen all this before, or at least feel as if we have, is a key reason why “The Good Guys,” the first broadcast network series from Matt Nix, the creator of “Burn Notice,” was picked up for a 13-episode summer run by Fox without even a pilot. But just as important as the twisted familiarity of Mr. Nix’s premise were the practical applications of his pitch, which was as much about production schedules and budgets as it was story lines and characters.

“Matt walks in the door with not only a finished script and a pitch for what the whole season was going to be,” said Kevin Reilly, the president of Fox Entertainment, “but with a willingness to deliver a network-quality show on a cable budget. We are getting a lot of bang for our buck, literally.”

Emiliano Calemzuk, president of Fox Television Studios, which produces “The Good Guys” and “Burn Notice,” said that the broadcast networks — whose production costs per hourlong episode range from $2 million to $5 million — can save as much as 30 percent by using the tighter budgets and schedules under which cable dramas like “Burn Notice” and “The Shield” have been forced to operate.

“The Good Guys” shoots an episode in seven days, three days fewer than a typical network drama. Shooting in Dallas also lowers costs, as does filming in the early part of the year. “We’re not competing with the normal pilot season and staffing season,” Mr. Calemzuk said. “All those things give us a cost advantage.”

That his first network series may have gotten picked up for reasons of economics as much as art, doesn’t bother Mr. Nix, 38, who started his show business career in the development department at Turner Network Television. “It’s no secret that everybody’s looking at the broadcast model and asking, ‘How can this possibly last?’ ” he said. “It’s too expensive, it’s too difficult, and the audience is fracturing. I’d love to work on a show like ‘The Cosby Show’ that half of America watches every week. But that doesn’t exist anymore. And it’s never coming back.”

Making his bosses at the network happy serves Mr. Nix’s purposes as well. “And my attitude is that I want it to be a really on-time, on-budget profitable show,” he said. “Then the network guys don’t worry so much about what I’m doing creatively and let me do what I want to do.”

What Mr. Nix wanted to do 10 years ago, when he wrote the first version of “The Good Guys” as a feature film script, was find a way a way to reinvent the buddy-cop action-comedy genre in the same way that “The Princess Bride” had reinvented fairy tales. “What I loved about that movie,” he said, “is that it’s telling a classic story in a way that acknowledges that you’ve heard the story before but finds a way to let you enjoy it in a whole new way. So I thought, ‘How can I remake this in the same way that gives me the same pleasure as when I was a kid?’ ”

The series, which makes its debut May 19, stars Mr. Whitford and Mr. Hanks as two problematic and seemingly mismatched Dallas cops relegated to the low-priority property crimes unit. They become a sort of Starsky & Hutch of small-appliance theft cases.

While “The Good Guys” draws heavily from the dark humor of films like “Get Shorty,” “Pulp Fiction” and “Raising Arizona,” it’s also an unapologetic shout-out to the days of TV cops with muscle cars and slightly askew moral compasses. Dan Stark, Mr. Whitford’s mustachioed character, may be drunk on the job — a lot — but Mr. Nix emphasizes that “he’s not a bad cop. Even if he does things that seem sleazy, they ultimately serve the cause of truth and justice.”

It’s a premise full of archetypes and in-jokes: the washed-up former hero (Mr. Whitford as a schnapps-swilling, ’80s-fashion-wearing rule breaker) and his reluctant younger partner (Mr. Hanks as a tech-savvy, full-of-himself know-it-all) solving crimes that invariably involve car chases, explosions and outraged superiors. The Fox promos scream: “Whitford. Hanks. Mustache.”

Mr. Nix promises that the show is smarter and more complex than it seems. But he also said he believes that there’s nothing inherently wrong with giving the audience and the networks what they want.

“I’m very self-conscious about saying this, but I was watching an English documentary about Bernini, about all those buildings centuries ago in Rome, and I realized that’s kind of the same thing we’re doing,” said Mr. Nix, a University of California, Los Angeles, graduate who grew up in Los Angeles, where his father was a private school headmaster and his mother the development director for the Living Desert nature preserve.

“I mean, you don’t get to say, ‘I want to build St. Peter’s without any creative input from the cardinal.’ You don’t get to build the Vatican as a solo creative artist, being free and putting columns wherever you want them. You’ve got to make a building that accommodates a certain number of people, that has room for bathrooms and that makes the guy writing the checks happy.”

“And when I look at my heroes in television and my heroes in art,” Mr. Nix added, “they’re the people who embraced that and got things done, didn’t hate the politics of it and didn’t hate the practical realities of it. Because you got to be an operator, that’s what the business is.”