"Brooklyn
South," Steven Bochco's new CBS drama about beat cops in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
opens with an either disturbed or chemically jacked-up man, who is black,
walking down the street shooting people at random with a handgun. He's
on his way to the 74th Precinct station house to settle a beef, and as
the cops rush out to intercept him, he starts picking them off. Somebody
in an apartment window above decides to get into the act and takes a shot
at the cops, too, so there are bodies and bullets flying everywhere. The
disturbed man is wounded just outside the police station and, with no ambulance
around and fearful of the sniper above, the sergeant on duty orders the
suspect brought inside the station to wait for the EMTs. Once they have
him inside and out of the sergeant's view, the angry cops (who are 99 percent
white) stand over the bleeding suspect jeering, "Cop killer!"; one cop
roughs him up, knocking him out. Then they all get nervous and split, leaving
the suspect unattended and unconscious.
Amazingly,
this pilot episode, which airs Monday, was written and filmed before the
Aug. 9 incident in another Brooklyn police precinct in which Haitian immigrant
Abner Louima was allegedly beaten and sodomized with a plunger handle by
a group of white cops while in custody, then left injured and unattended
for hours on the station house floor.
This
isn't the first time Bochco and "Brooklyn South" co-writer/co-producer
William M. Finkelstein have seemingly foretold a high-profile incident
of white-on-black police brutality. Six months before the March 1991 videotaped
beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers, Bochco and Finkelstein's debut
episode of their ABC series "Cop Rock" depicted a Los Angeles -- and an
LAPD -- polarized by racial and class animosity. In a scene that was shocking
for its time, a brutal, bigoted, arrogant white cop -- a hero to his brothers
in blue -- takes matters into his own hands when an attempt to arrest a
(black) suspected cop killer goes wrong and it appears the bust will not
stick in court. The cop stands the handcuffed suspect up against a wall,
shoots him dead and tells his black partner, intimidatingly, "You're not
here."
Since
his groundbreaking "Hill Street Blues" in the early '80s, Bochco has been
producing provocative dramas about cops that are also in large part provocative
dramas about race, how it underpins and pulls at everything in American
society. After all, nobody knows the consequences of racial and economic
inequality better than the cops who deal with them first-hand. And nothing
gets people to soul search about racism more effectively than a community
polarizing case of police brutality or deadly force.
At
a time when network cop shows existed in a sugar-coated approximation of
the inner city and its problems, "Hill Street Blues" depicted an economically
depressed urban police precinct with head spinning realism. "Hill Street"
took place in a once vital urban center abandoned by white politicians
and business leaders; the only whites who still lived there were too poor
or too old to leave. A large number of those arrested were black or Latino.
There were several black cops on the force. And there were bigots on the
force too, flaming Nazis like Lt. Howard Hunter and jovially ignorant good
old boys like Andy Renko, who was always unconsciously insulting his black
partner. In a chapter about "Hill Street Blues" from his 1985 book "Inside
Prime Time," sociology and media professor Todd Gitlin wrote, "'Hill Street
Blues' was a show that knew race and class tear this society apart, that
behaving decently under these conditions is an everyday trial, and there
are no blindingly obvious solutions for the accumulated miseries of the
ghetto. The show's racial by-play honored the everyday street sense of
race without sliding into race baiting."
Yet,
despite such striving for realistic "racial by-play," Bochco and company
have often been called up short by a less than stellar racial mix behind
the scenes of their shows. There was one African American director on "Hill
Street" (Thomas Carter) and no black or Latino writers. In "Inside Prime
Time," Gitlin reports that "Hill Street" cast members Michael Warren, Taurean
Blacque and Rene Enriquez were unofficial script monitors on the alert
for stereotypical dialogue, characters and situations.
There
was also a widely reported 1994 incident in which Bochco associate David
Milch, the co-creator of "NYPD Blue," made what were interpreted as racist
remarks at a question-and-answer session before an audience of aspiring
television screenwriters.
In
his book "True Blue: The Real Stories Behind 'NYPD Blue,'" Milch recounts
being asked at the session about the amount of screen time given depictions
of Andy Sipowicz's racism on "NYPD Blue": "I explained Steven's and my
belief that not to portray racists in a series about New York cops would
have made the show incredible. I said it wasn't difficult for me to portray
Sipowicz in this aspect of his nature, that I could identify racist impulses
in myself."
After
that, writes Milch, "The tone of subsequent questions became combative."
Milch
acknowledges in "True Blue" that he finally did himself in with his explanation
of why there were so few African-Americans writing for TV dramas: "I proposed
that in the area of drama, it was difficult for black American writers
to write successfully for a mass audience. When they wrote out of the complexities
of their own experience ... the result might be powerful and compelling
as art but not commercially successful." Then, by way of illustration,
he told the audience about a writing seminar he organized a few years earlier
to "expose minority writers to the process of writing for television ...
Of those who'd attended the seminar, four (of 15) had gone on to success
as television writers, but none of these were black."
One
result of the outrage and embarrassment over Milch's remarks (the Washington
Post's headline read, "Black and 'NYPD Blue': Co-creator tells seminar,
'I'm racist,'" prompting the Rev. Jesse Jackson to pay a call to the president
of ABC) was that "NYPD Blue" hired a regular black writer, David Mills.
Another result was that Sipowicz has been made to suffer more obviously
for his racism; his use of the "N" word was shown to diminish him in the
eyes of his wife and his African American lieutenant and cost him any chance
at career advancement.
Milch
was back on the hot seat this past July after the pilot of "Brooklyn South,"
which he co-produced and co-wrote with Bochco, Finkelstein and "NYPD Blue"
consultant and former cop Bill Clark, was screened for TV critics at the
networks' annual summer press tour. At a press conference, Milch faced
one critic who implied that the show was racist because all but one of
the featured actors playing cops are white, while all of the perps in the
pilot are black or Latino. Without conceding anything, Milch announced
that the producers had planned to introduce another featured black cop
character in the second episode but were now adding him to the pilot in
order to correct "an ineffective dramatic impression."
OK,
it's true -- most of the cops on "Brooklyn South" are white. And it's not
pleasant to watch their treatment of the African-American cop killing suspect,
nor is it particularly cheering to watch that wall of white and blue hauling
in criminal after criminal of color. But let it also be said that New York
City Police Commissioner Howard Safir ordered a complete shakeup of the
70th precinct after the Louima incident, calling for more minority officers
to be assigned to the predominantly white squad. In "Brooklyn South," Bochco,
Milch, Finkelstein and Clark, who've made a career of cop-watching, have
realistically depicted the racial makeup -- and the dangers inherent in
that racial makeup -- that lead to alleged incidents like the beating of
Louima. Calling the result "racist" is like breaking your mirror because
you don't like your face.
In
New York City, police and Haitian community activists have expressed concern
that the similarities in the "Brooklyn South" story line might add to tensions
over the Louima incident. But Bochco told the Los Angeles Times on Aug.
21 that "we're already five episodes into our show and we're not changing
anything ... We're telling good stories about complicated police and community
issues."
One
of those complicated issues is whether the criminal justice system, rotting
from racism within and public distrust without, can ever be rehabilitated.
"Hill Street" was the first show to depict cops losing their authority
and in all of Bochco's cop shows since, a cop's job has been portrayed
as a thankless one undertaken only by the incorrigibly idealistic or the
hopelessly masochistic (of course, on "NYPD Blue," Sipowicz and Simone
manage to be both at the same time).
With
its emphasis on beleaguered foot soldiers, "Brooklyn South" does often
seem like "Hill Street" for a freer era of TV (the cops can say "asshole"
now instead of euphemisms like "hairbag") and an even more disillusioned
time. "Brooklyn South" is no mere "Hill Street" retread, though; Bochco
and his posse are genre writers in the best sense and their cop shows,
set in a teeming urban frontier, are the Westerns of today. (To drive the
point home, there's even a musical quote from "Bonanza" in the middle of
Mike Post's "Hill Street"/"NYPD"-cannibalizing "Brooklyn South" theme song.)
The crackling pilot of "Brooklyn South," especially its harrowing opening
sequence, draws you into the unpredictable, pitiless universe of the beat
cop -- the modern deputy with his tin star, trying to keep the peace in
a badlands where he's mistrusted and despised. On this show, blue is a
lonely color; to the citizens they've sworn to protect, all cops, white
or black, upstanding or wrong, are perceived as bad cops.
Of
the ensemble cast, you will love Gary Basaraba as no-bullshit desk Sgt.
Richard Santoro and you will be intrigued by Titus Welliver as Officer
Jack Lowery, the seething screw-up who's about to become the show's Stacy
Koon/Mark Fuhrman/Justin Volpe (pick one). As usual, there are familiar
faces from other Bochco shows: James B. Sikking, Howard Hunter from "Hill
Street," plays shark toothed internal affairs Lt. Stan Jonas and Michael
DeLuise, who played Andy Sipowicz's ill-fated son on "NYPD," finally gets
a chance to wear a uniform.
"Brooklyn
South" is first-rate Bochco (for third-rate Bochco, see his other new show,
"Total Security," which premieres Saturday on ABC). It's a show that isn't
afraid to say that race is a messy issue few Americans have been able to
sort out -- the show's creators included. As Milch promised at the summer
press tour, some scenes in the pilot have been reshot to include Officer
Clement Johnson, a black cop played by Richard T. Jones. But even with
the addition of this character, "Brooklyn South" is nowhere near "balanced."
And that's the point: How balanced is real life?
