“Hey,” he spat back, tugging rudely at his trousers. “Ipsa this, you pissy little bitch.” The district attorney looked down at the welcoming hand, she looked up, she looked away. The opening credits rolled.
America, shake hands with “NYPD Blue,” the most controversial–and the best–new series on TV this year. Over the last 11 weeks, the show has crossed frontiers of nudity and profanity most of us have experienced only in real life, or maybe on cable television, video, magazines or the movies. But it is these first few minutes–of class warfare, sexual hostility and petty corruption, all distilled into an indelibly profane salute–that say it all. For clerics across much of the country, this was the moral sinkhole they’d been warning their flocks about ever since executive producer Steven Bochco–creator of the benchmark “Hill Street Blues” and “L.A. Law”–had promised TV’s first R-rated series. For the show’s writers, though, it was the start of something beautiful. They’d originally planned to open with a nude sex scene, but scrapped it because, according to coexecutive producer Gregory Hoblit, “one of us said, “You know, it doesn’t get us anywhere’.” The courtroom self-destruction of Sipowicz was another matter. In the poetic vocabulary of these New York streets and these characters, “ipsa this” is the opening line of a love story. It was a fine how do you do.
It was also the teaser for what has proven to be extraordinary television: gritty, taut and sharply written. For 12 rocky years (page 59) Bochco has been network television’s most churlish and most visionary troublemaker. “NYPD Blue” simmers with his leering adolescent libido, but also with his gift for stirring up the demons in the bottom of our bathwater. Yet for all the predictable fuss about transgressive language and nudity, the series wins on very conventional broadcast-TV terms. It has credible story lines and characters worth returning to every week. Like “Hill Street” or “L.A. Law,” it just smells right. And it does what network TV does best. The successful police dramas of any era work because they tap the floating anxieties about crime and play them back as entertainment. “NYPD Blue” draws a city engulfed in race and class war. In a season when voters appeared haunted by crime, Bochco and longtime collaborator David Milch depict violence as part of a collapsing urban infrastructure. The law sometimes barely rates an afterthought. This working-stiff police force, alienated from the rest of the city, harbors as much brutality and rot as it confronts.
The show centers on Detectives Sipowicz and the younger John Kelly–played by David Caruso, who has emerged as this season’s male sex symbol. They are, like the rest of the cast in the 112th Precinct, ground samplings of ethnic New York: Kelly the flaming red-haired Irishman, son of a cop, a troubled saint with a weathered but well-displayed backside; Sipowicz, a walking puddle of cholesterol buildup, with the same heavy Chicago accent Franz carried in “Hill Street.” Balding, overweight, a recovering alcoholic and unreconstructed racist, he is a complicated moral center for a network TV series–an obsolescent white guy with a powerful sense of right and wrong but a flawed compass. Kelly’s insides are nearly as ragged. He can’t manage to resolve his decayed marriage and his steamy new relationship with another cop (Amy Brenneman, the season’s other new sex symbol). Sipowicz and Kelly spend as much time tending the squalor in their own kitchens as that out in the streets. Every character has a sore spot, says Caruso. “The forte of David Milch is that he going to pick that scab.” This scavenging among the entrails gives the show’s language not just legitimacy but real power. When Sipowicz calls someone a scumbag, the epithet seems to burble up from his soul, and to shade everything it touches along the way. It’s not so much an insult that he hurls at his interlocutor as a piece of his own flesh.
Though Buchco set the direction for the series and gave it his imprimatur–it falls under his $50 million, 10-series deal with ABC–the real creative force on the show is probably David Milch. All of the characters, says writer Ted Mann, are “David’s internal creatures.” And Milch’s own hellhounds are as voracious as those that haunt any of his characters. The son of a Buffalo, N.Y., surgeon, Milch has been a Yale University lecturer, a drug addict, a failed novelist, failed screenwriter, compulsive gambler and highly successful television writer. He was thrown out of Yale Law School for taking a shotgun to a police car, and later spent time in a Mexican jail. People who have worked with him describe him as a genius, a monster or a monstrous genius. “David has a rather addictive personality,” says Dick Wolf, a writer with Milch on “Hill Street” who went on to create the series “Law and Order.” Even a heart problem that hospitalized Milch just before Thanksgiving has only somewhat slowed him down. “He’s been asked not to gamble,” says Mann. “But he had five or six horses running the other day.”
The show runs on these obsessive passions. Milch’s precinct house is almost hyperrealistic: it overflows with far more verisimilitude than you’d find in real life. “It is a day in the life of this place,” hoblit says, “and some of it is ugly, some of it is racist, some of it is sexist, some of it is ludicrous, absurd, funny, off the wall.” Though the show has as strict agreement with the network on what language and body parts it can feature–and in what quantities–Milch pushes other boundaries. On a recent episode, Kelly reached a dead end in his interrogation of a suspect. As the handheld camera closed in, Kelly silently handed his gun and badge to anther officer and asked him to wait outside. He slowly shut the blinds of the interrogation room. Leaning into the suspect, his face balled up in contempt, he promised to give the man “the beating of you life.” As he moved to carry out the threat, the suspect confessed. It was a harrowing moment for prime-time police drama: a heroic portrayal of the police tactics half the nation fears. It was as close as you could come to what Milch calls “an apologia for fascism.” But for him, even this didn’t go far enough. In the original script, Kelly delivered on his threat. “They wouldn’t let me do that,” says Milch. He means his colleagues, no the network.
Even so, the show has gone too far for some of its handlers. From the moment Bochco started pushing the pilot last summer, network affiliate stations and major advertisers have been queasy about getting involved. Bochco was on a cold streak, and one-hour dramas have nearly dried up. Why take the risk? “When we saw the pilot,” says Louis Wall, general manager of the ABC station in Augusta, Ga., “we said, “Woof! No way!’” Under pressure from watchdog groups, 57 mostly Southern ABC affiliate stations declined to air the opening episode, and 44 still don’t carry the show. The network has taken the unprecedented step of offering the show to independent or Fox stations in areas where its own affiliates don’t want it–essentially handing over a hit program to the competition. Advertisers, wary of possible boycott campaigns, remain an even harder sell. Despite ratings consistently in the top 15, the program has drawn next to no advertising from industry mainstays: beer, cars and fast food. Asked how long the network was willing to lose money on the series, ABC Entertainment president Ted Harbert admits: “The answer is, I don’t know. It’s not a charity concern here at ABC.”
There are ample hopeful signs. Volkswagen recently signed on for an ad campaign, and Harbert is optimistic that others will follow once the controversy settles. But for the network, success raises perhaps an even more troubling question than failure: now that the line has been breached, will every producer want to drop profanities and trousers on prime time? Harbert says that so far, no one has asked: “I’ve put out the word that the answer will be no.”
If the show stays hot, though, that will surely change. Television executives are quick to learn from successes, if not from their failures. But it’d be nice if someone learned the more homey, old-fashioned lessons of this newfangled show. Stories sell, character development sells. These are boring lessons. But for 60 minutes most Tuesday nights, they make for a spell of gritty, gripping television. Did You See That?
Every week, “NYPD Blue” test the limits of network conventions. In just one episode, the show offered these:
Sipowicz and a hooker. Kelly (rebuffed by his soon-to-be ex-wife) and Licalsi.
You can count on Sipowicz for most, including “pissy little bitch,” “a–hole,” “son of a bitch” and our personal favorite, “wig-wearing scumbag hump.”
The hooker, the mafiosi, the porn patrons.
Cracking down on a peep show; going after a toupee-wearing, homicidal slime ball but falling into a honey trap.
In Hollywood, as in the real world, the mighty fall and rise and fall and rise.
First great ensemble cop show. Won many hearts and Emmys.
Took a dive. After four episodes, NBC deep-sixed it.
Still steaming away.
Well-received “dramedy.”
Angelic-looking doctor, great bedside manner. And only 16.
Singing crime? No thanks.
More legal eagles. Mariel Hemingway discreetly nude.
Animated family show put to sleep quickly.
