Gritty police procedural paved the way for other US cop shows
know I’ve mentioned before the fondness in our household for an American police procedural drama or two.
And in recent weeks we've been mainlining which ran from 1993 to 2005, as it is now all on Disney+.
I vaguely recall it being on Channel 4 back in the day, and even remember watching a couple of the early episodes. But seeing as my parents still had control of the TV remote at that point, it wasn't something they watched, so neither did I.
It was however, one of those shows that attracted critical acclaim and controversy in equal amounts. On the former front it was showered with awards during its run, on the latter it is unstinting in its portrayal of violence, and unusually for an American network drama, sex. That said, camera angles and limbs do a lot of work in preventing – gasp – a woman's nipple from ever getting airtime, but there are plenty of male and female backsides on display. (You can probably see now the appeal to a teenage boy...)
The show follows the lives of the detective squad based at the 15th Precinct in Manhattan.
The opener, in which alcoholic detective Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) is shot by a mobster he's crossed while visiting a prostitute he's a regular client of, sets the scene nicely.
It's gritty, grimy stuff and immediately demonstrates that we're a long way from the glossy Miami Vice cop dramas of the 1980s.
His partner, John Kelly (David Caruso) is the ying to Sipowicz's yang. Where the former is an overweight loose cannon with questionable views on race, gender and many other issues, Kelly is the cool, calm collected lady's man, routinely covering for his partner's behaviour.
Caruso, in his first leading role, is clearly being groomed
Ias the star of the show – and he clearly thought so too, as he quit during the second season when the show-runners failed to give him the raise he wanted.
I've always found his style rather mannered and laboured – but after he failed to break Hollywood he came back to TV in where he perfected his sotto voce, “I'm emoting” style, for a decade.
This did though set the show up with a disregard for the permanence of its leads - I can't say more without spoilers, but there is a worrying rate of attrition in the 15th precinct.
While it has developed into more of an ensemble piece over time (we're now on season 7 of 12), it's Franz's Sipowicz who emerges as the beating heart of the show. For all his faults – and oh boy does he have his faults – he can also display warmth and compassion, and you are often rooting for him.
The plots often revolve around ‘crime of the week’ dramas, but there are plenty of ongoing lines, some which will last a season, some which will be referred back to only obliquely, in a manner I bet I would have missed if watching a week at a time as originally broadcast, instead of binging the episodes!
The tangle, believable relationships between the characters is also key - unlike some other procedurals (I'm looking at you CSI franchise) where the characters seem incidental to the plots.
The show will occasionally drop references to real-life events into the script, which would have added to the contemporaneous feel at the time, but is now just as likely to get you scrabbling for Wikipedia. A recent episode we saw mentioned the shooting of Amadou Diallo – an unarmed black man who was shot 41 times by NYPD officers, who were subsequently acquitted at trial – a hugely controversial news story at the time. We have yet to reach 2001, but it will be interesting to see how they handle 9/11.
With any US show like this, part of the joy can be seeing who pops up in supporting roles. A pre-Friends David Schwimmer has a recurring part in the opening series as an unfortunate lawyer out to prove his masculinity, or there's Debra Messing before as the man-hungry sister of the detectives' assistant, or Paul Giamatti, Lucy Liu, and Danny Trejo before Hollywood came knocking, or various others who went on to have starring roles in the likes of and
or in the
Marvel universe.
There is so much to get your teeth into here. It doesn't rise to the heights of (but what does?) but you can certainly see it laying the groundwork.