In his first TV show since retiring the role of Vic Mackey in The Shield, Michael Chiklis will soon be bounding into your living room as Jim Powell, a police sketch artist who receives the supernatural powers of super-strength, the ability to be bullet-proof and can leap buildings in a…well, you get the idea.

We caught up with Chiklis at San Diego’s Comic-Con and talked to him about his upcoming role and how it is and isn’t a departure from characters he’s portrayed in the past. After all, how do you follow up Vic Mackey by playing another cop?

“Here we have a family show at its core, wrapped in a police procedural, wrapped in a superhero show. That’s something I’ve not seen before. If The Shield lacked any credibility at all, it was the fact that Mackey didn’t have an aneurysm. Seven years of that can wreck havoc on your nervous system and it’s really kind of great and refreshing to do something that I can sit with my family and watch. My eleven year old was starting to question whether I was even an actor. She’s like, ‘dad, do you really act? I can’t see anything you’re in.’”

The concept behind No Ordinary Family will sound familiar to Fantastic Four and The Incredibles fans, but there hasn’t been an adaptation in this vein developed for television in recent memory. Sure, four characters get powers (strength, super speed, telepathy and super intelligence) and yes, it’s combined within a family that is struggling to stay connected and important to each other. But what would you rather see? Superheroes or more Cops?

“I thought it was long overdue. I did the Fantastic Four movies and I’ve been a comic book geek for a long time, since I was a kid. It’s funny though, a bunch of people have said to me, almost as if there’s been tons and tons of superhero shows on television, and to mind, I only can think of one, really in the last 20 years, which is Heroes, which is a decidedly different show.

But I’m thinking, we’re on cop show 475,000 and no one goes, ‘oh really, another cop show?!’ And some people are all, oh you’re going to play another superhero again? Yes! This place (Comic-Con) isn’t getting smaller. Now they’re making more money at Comic-Con than they did at the SuperBowl. This is a genre that’s here to stay. And it’s only natural as a genre to explore the different shapes of it.”

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