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Within minutes of the opening of Steven Bochco's controversial new "Brooklyn South", viewers become eyewitnesses to a shoot-out so brutal the episode carries a TV-MA rating -- the sternest possible warning. 

A black crack addict with a gun goes berserk on his way to the precinct house, and before he's apprehended, cops and bystanders drop like bowling pins. 

A detective, lying wounded on the sidewalk, is shot a second time in the head. A piece of his skull flies off. 

The shooter is later dragged into the police station, bleeding from chest wounds. As he lies, handcuffed, on a blood-streaked back-room floor, the cops of Brooklyn's 74th Precinct kick, punch, and insult him, and even berate the medics trying to save the man's life. 

"Die," one cop says to the shooter. He soon does, and another cop says, "Good." 

The scene -- especially controversial given Abner Louima's allegations of police brutality at a real life Brooklyn precinct -- caps a sequence that's remarkably shocking, even for a drama from Bochco, the man who has brought to television a progressively innovative string of cop hits and flops, from "Hill Street Blues" to "Cop Rock" and "NYPD Blue." 

"I've often said to Steven that one of the things he'll be arraigned for in whatever afterlife awaits him is the phrase 'pushing the envelope,'" says David Milch, the three-time Emmy winner who co-created and executive produces "NYPD Blue" and shares executive producer duties with Bochco and William M. Finkelstein on the new drama. "Each show has made possible the shows which follow, because each show changes the conventions." 

"Brooklyn South" was shot long before the Louima incident, and Bochco said last month that he would not change a thing about the new series because the circumstances of the drama and the real-life incident are strikingly different. 

"Brooklyn South" takes the violence and grit a step beyond "NYPD Blue," and has the kind of edge that "Blue" used to have. 

Instead of detectives trying to solve crimes, the series follows what Milch calls "proactive" Brooklyn beat cops.

The pilot fails to flesh out several members of the large ensemble cast -- including Officers Phil Roussakoff (Michael DeLuise, who played Andy Sipowicz Jr. on "NYPD Blue") and Anne-Marie Kersey (Yancy Butler). 

Far more vivid are the likable Officer Jimmy Doyle (Dylan Walsh), Patrol Sgt. Francis X. Donovan (Jon Tenney), tough-as-nails Sgt. Richard Santoro (Gary Basaraba), and Internal Affairs Bureau Lt. Stan Jonas -- played by "Hill Street" alumnus James B. Sikking. 

"This is going to be a contemporary police show based on the Police Department today," says supervising producer Bill Clark, a 25-year veteran of the New York Police Department, who spent 17 of those years in the homicide division. 

Milch and Clark wrote the book "True Blue: The Real Stories Behind 'NYPD Blue'." 

Every four weeks, Milch says, Clark flies New York detectives and beat cops to California to meet with the Bochco creative team, "just so we can talk and I can stay fresh," Milch says. 

One of these conversations with a retired cop -- who recalled an incident that took place in the late Seventies -- was so compelling that it led the producers to change the way the show was supposed to open. 

Milch insists, however, that the opening -- and what has come to be known as the "exploding head" shot -- were not concocted for the sake of controversy. 

"That shot, and that initial sequence of violence, had to do with our intention of establishing an atmosphere," Milch says. "And I think it may be fair to say that, if the show runs as long as we all hope it does, there may not be that much violence again in a whole other season." 

The sequence, he says, is intended to not only make viewers understand, on a visceral level, "one source of reality in a cop's life," but also to "put on to its feet a theme that we're going to explore in all different kinds of ways, which is the ambiguous emotional contract between the citizenry and the cop." 

That contract, Milch says, involves cops understanding that people want protection, but also to maintain the illusion that bad guys' rights aren't violated in the process. 

"People don't really want that to happen with criminals, but we have to maintain that illusion," Milch says. 

"What that sequence is intended to do is to bring the viewer first to that kind of emotional complicity in the act of vigilantism ... and then to live in the consequences and realization of what foul dust kind of floats in vigilantism's wake."