Not So PC After All

Steven Bochco's TV For White People

Murder One, NYPD Blue (ABC).

by Sara Laschever

As Murder One sputters, stalls, and slips into a tailspin only a few short weeks after its much-hyped premiere, the causes of its failure can be traced, like so much else, to that funhouse mirror of mid-'90s American culture, the Simpson trial. For in addition to illuminating the radically divergent life experiences of blacks and whites in America today, the trial highlighted a related truth about our culture, which is how much we as a people distrust the official bodies we've created to safeguard our liberties: We don't like lawyers, and we don't like cops.

Although most whites today may not have personal experience of the unprovoked viciousness of many policemen, few of us feel reassured by the presence of police the way city residents once felt safer when they heard their local beat patrolman tapping his night-stick on the sidewalk railing. Despite three decades of outcry about the lawlessness of our cities, we feel only slightly less threatened by the police than by the criminals we've hired them to protect us from. Massive police corruption scandals have become a reliable occurrence in our major cities (this fall, as New York's Mellon Commission started disappearing from the headlines, evidence began emerging that a band of rogue cops in Philadelphia had been framing church-going grandmothers for drug possession). In this climate, idealism about the honorable intentions of the average policeman has become a luxury only law-and-order white Republicans can afford.

Steven Bochco might feel unwelcome in that crowd--he positions himself as one of Hollywood's last liberals, and has taken strong stands in favor of free speech. But both NYPD Blue and Murder One show him to be much closer in spirit to conservative white America than most of his audience recognizes. By showing a little more skin than network censors previously allowed in prime time, he has successfully floated the idea that he is breaking new ground while in fact zealously reinforcing the status quo.

On NYPD Blue, he presents a Manhattan detective squad that includes only one black character, Lieutenant Fancy (James McDaniel),a middle-class married man who loves his family and is the most boring, under-written character in the show. The rest of the squadron/lifeboat reflects the demographics of the entertainment industry better than it reflects the demographics of the New York City police department. Regulars include two light-skinned, unaccented Hispanics (one played by an Italian, Nicholas Turturro)and four or more women at any given time, all of them babes--no Betty Thomas (Lucy Bates on Hill Street Blues) here to represent the ordinarily attractive working woman. The single gay character, John Irvin (Bill Brochtrup), is a simpering cliché, over-played and embarrassing. And this Lower East Side precinct includes no Italians, no Chinese, no Jews, (no cripples), and, since the departure of David Caruso as John Kelly, no Irish cops.

The shows' story lines are also resolutely old-fashioned: Crimes happen, cops investigate crimes, cops solve crimes. Some personal shenanigans are thrown in to endear the cops to the audience, reveal character, and provide comic relief (although NYPD Blue mercifully lacks preposterous characters on the scale of Hill Street Blues' James B. Sikking as the militaristic Lieutenant Howard Hunter and L.A. Law's Alan Rachins as the dorkish Douglas Brackmann). But the show's outlook is basically Dirty Harry conservative: The cops are always the good guys, and anyone from internal affairs looking into their behavior is not only the enemy, but--worse in Hollywood terms--an oaf.

Because Bochco is such a skilled practitioner of the one-hour dramatic format, he makes this message not merely palatable, but hugely entertaining. The characters are quirky, well-written, and well-played, the scripts are suspenseful and involving, and the rich production values and flashy verité camera work make it all look great. His talent also effectively conceals the show's even more reactionary content: the glamorization of urban police practices that regularly include the use of violence, lies, threats, and trickery to intimidate suspects and witnesses. In a recent show, in which Detective Martinez, played by Turturro, was shot, the rest of the squad withheld medical care from a wounded suspect--going so far as to hide him from an emergency room doctor--until he set up an accomplice for them. In other episodes, the detectives have promised suspects pie-in-the-sky deals the D.A. would never approve, beaten or threatened witnesses until they talked, lied about the favorable consideration suspects would receive if they confessed, and coerced them into talking before "lawyering up." When John Kelly's career was derailed by Internal Affairs because he lied on the witness stand to help an ex-lover who'd murdered someone to save his life, his partner, Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz), stated flatly, "Everyone lies on the witness stand." It's a fact of life in America's police departments, and it would be naive of us to think otherwise. (The show's interrogation scenes closely resemble NBC's Homicide,which differs mainly in being less well-written.)

While patting himself on the back for such "gritty realism, "Bochco condones this Constitution-busting behavior by making the police the heroes of the show and the witnesses and suspects urban scum. As a result, when the hour is over, his audiences don't lose sleep worrying about police stretching the law. In Bochco's world, cops only stretch the law to see justice done, and they don't make mistakes. They may have personal problems (Andy Sipowicz's alcoholism, John Kelly's foundering marriage), but they are never arbitrary and never wrong. Even when they lose control and publicly go over the line, as Sipowicz did when provoked by a mob figure who tried to kill him, there is never any question about who is the good guy. (In losing David Caruso, who conveyed a far more conflicted relationship to the moral underpinnings of his behavior than Jimmy Smits signals as Bobby Simone, NYPD Blue lost the one note of dissent in this otherwise retrograde version of life in the streets.)

That NYPD Blue is so popular is testament not to the accuracy of its portrayal of a New York City detective squad, but to the skill of Bochco's writers in feeding the majority white populace's hunger to believe that the good guys are on our side.(Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg's ER benefits from a similar hunger--the desire of most Americans, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to believe that the medical profession is peopled exclusively by gifted, self-sacrificing professionals who will go to any lengths to help a patient.)

Unfortunately, Mark Fuhrman's exposure as a brutal, vainglorious thug caused a dramatic shift in the old good guy/bad guy balance of power. Wealthy, privileged, and famous, O. J. Simpson had become colorless, "one of us." At that critical moment when Fuhrman took the fifth after being asked if he'd framed Simpson, a whole class of people who'd always believed in the trustworthiness of policemen suddenly felt vulnerable. In the aftermath of this seismic tilt, it remains to be seen whether audiences will still buy NYPDBlue's seductive fantasy. In the post-Fuhrman world, can we still kid ourselves that police are all decent, attractive people justified by their intuitive gifts (cf. Orson Welles in Touch of Evil)in using whatever means necessary to get at the truth?

If detectives Fuhrman and Vanatter badly shook our trust in the police, this was nothing compared to the damage inflicted on the legal profession by the trial. Although Johnnie Cochran may be a hero to blacks, most whites found his tactics questionable and his alliance with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam appalling. Robert Shapiro, although widely ridiculed for his celebrity-mongering (like the rest of us are above such things), emerged from the trial looking marginally more decent than Cochran, but less effective. F. Lee Bailey has never been a crowd-pleaser. Alan Dershowitz may be a distinguished legal scholar, but his ego is the common butt of jokes in the mainstream media. And Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, though perceived as heroic by some whites, bear the stigma of being losers. Judge Ito didn't fare much better. In his efforts to avoid giving the defense any pretext for an appeal, he came off as soft, indecisive, and overly eager to please--not exactly the image of judicial authority.

Bochco couldn't have predicted how the trial would end, of course, but given the drubbing the legal profession took in the process, he could not have picked a worse time to launch a show about heroic, high-priced celebrity lawyers. He must be the only man left in America who sees lawyers as repositories of wisdom and probity. As a result, poor Daniel Benzali, playing Murder One's lead character Ted Hoffman, must deliver himself of at least one pompous lecture per episode about the social utility of lawyers. (Hoffman is said to be modeled on the Hollywood lawyer Howard Weitzman, who declined to represent Simpson once the evidence began piling up, claiming he was "too busy"). In one episode, Hoffman explains to a barroom drunk that he defends rich social pariahs because it "makes us better people" if men like that get a fair trial, and in another he ridicules his junior associates for worrying about successfully defending an investment advisor who gambled away the life savings of a dozen retirees. For the rest of the show, Benzali speaks with a rasping, world-weary deliberation that signals his superior insight into the human condition. He alone among the characters is a faithful husband and devoted father, Hollywood short-hand for a good man (all you single people and unhappily married folks give it up). Although he represents scumbags, he does so as Clarence Darrow did, apparently--for the principle of the thing, that principle being the right of rich people to the best defense money can buy. Because Benzali is such a formidable presence, and his character is treated with such reverence by the scriptwriters, the lone voice to question his motivation is that of his over-the-top wife, who says that as the mother of a teenage daughter she thinks every man who slept with the murder victim at the center of the trial (a 15-year-old girl) should be strung up.

A secondary story line in a recent episode further emphasized where Bochco's sympathies lie. In it, Hoffman defended a detective charged with using excessive force to stop a wife-batterer from harassing his wife. The wife-batterer was presented as a braggart, liar, and crybaby, while the offending detective was played by Joe Spano, an actor who conveys a soft-spoken humanity and who for eight years onHill Street Blues played Henry Goldblume, the precinct's compassionate hostage negotiator. The prosecution painted the Spano character as a "bad cop" who took the law into his own hands; Hoffman countered that he'd gone to the house several times on domestic violence calls and was impelled to use extreme force to save the wife's life. Before the case could be settled, the husband murdered the wife for testifying against him, thereby validating Hoffman's--and Bochco's--point of view. Cops have to play these situations as they see them, and are sometimes forced to work around the law. The analogy to Mark Fuhrman was inescapable--he, too, had been called to the Simpson house because husband was beating wife; he, too, had reason to believe the wife's life was in danger; and he, too(?!), was justified in doing whatever it took to see justice done.

A startling intimation at a time when Fuhrman is probably the most reviled man in America, it suggests Bochco may be getting too old and too rich to stay in touch with mainstream sentiment. At the very least, he has spent too much time in Hollywood, where "daring" means more sexually explicit (the bare butts on NYPD Blue, the bare everything in Showgirls) or more visually flashy (the jerky hand-held camerawork of NYPD Blue, the rapid-fire cutting ofER). That's the same Hollywood where the TV industry can launch 42 shows in a time of unprecedented attack on government programs for the disadvantaged without producing one that looks honestly at the schisms of race, class, and gender rupturing American society.

But let's face it, if Bochco had fielded a show with all white characters (okay, there's a black female receptionist in MurderOne) that was sexy, smart, and fun to watch, no one would have cared about his politics. What makes Murder One a dud is that his political sympathies have blinded him to what makes good television. For one thing, audiences want to like the central characters in their dramas. And while Bochco obviously adores Ted Hoffman, to the rest of us he comes off as a pompous windbag who cuts his conscience to fit his ambition, not unlike Bochco himself. He reminds audiences of something they found particularly troubling during the Simpson trial: how lawyers can set aside all questions of guilt and innocence and focus exclusively on legal gamesmanship, on winning. For another thing, Murder One was heavily marketed as formally daring, but its narrative devices are completely traditional and formulaic. Night-time dramas frequently feature plot-lines that carry over from one episode to another--the fact that this one involves a long trial is hardly Brechtian. Bochco's mistake was not in following one case for an entire season, as he'll probably conclude if the show fails, but in choosing the wrong focus and a slick, glossy visual style to suit that focus.

Why the lawyers, for god's sake? Haven't there been enough shows about lawyers? A much more original approach would have been to follow the entire trial through the eyes of the jury--their behavior during the Simpson trial has mystified the most people, after all (or at least the most white people, the majority of Bochco's audience).Or he might have chosen an even more ambitious tactic and shown a multiplicity of viewpoints: the Rashomon approach. If nothing else, O. J. Simpson's nine months in court confirmed the truism that different people can witness the same events and see very different things. This approach would have opened up wonderful opportunities for both formal invention and visual pizzazz. Rather than grudgingly acknowledging the impact of Court TV with the brief "Law TV" intros that start the show, he might have played with the various styles of different media outlets. He might have even dug into how the mainstream media, which though not controlled by Jews is certainly controlled by whites, takes all the trivial, momentous, and ambiguous events that take place in a courtroom--expressions of grief or confusion, lawyerly expostulations, accounts of half-remembered noises, arcane expert testimony--and quickly codifies them into a received version, a standard interpretation. Certainly one of the most electrifying aspects of the Simpson trial was how distorted--how skewed toward white sensibilities--that standard interpretation turned out to be. The press and its many commentators, most of them white, heard and saw something very different in that courtroom from what the jury heard and saw. Exploring how that can happen would be a fine starting point for a television drama. Exploring how celebrity lawyers are good guys, too, is not. People would much rather believe that if they find themselves in a medical emergency, a bunch of great-looking young doctors will be eagerly waiting to save their lives.

Back to the millennium pop contents page