|
The
casting of former child actor Rick Schroeder,
opposite Franz's Sipowicz was viewed
by most (myself included) as a desperate reach for younger
viewers. Schroeder was so loathed, so universally panned
before a single episode with his Detective Danny Sorenson aired,
that it greatly depressed Schroeder, a fellow Coloradoan and
family man who had severe reservations about returning to
Hollywood in the first place. Sorenson's first episode,
brilliantly woven into the '98 season where they'd negotiated five
episodes from Smits, just knocked the hell out of everybody.
Schroeder's debut was brilliantly and expertly written directly
towards the cloud of suspicion and doubt swirling around the new
casting choice. Sorenson was universally disliked by the other Blue
characters, and ended his first day on the job at a bar, wondering
what the hell he'd just gotten himself into: something Schroeder
himself, I have to imagine, was wondering.
The addition of Sorenson provided many new
opportunities for Milch and the gang, as Franz was finally
rewarded for his brilliant acting by being bumped into the first
chair, and the show ultimately became Franz's vehicle (Franz had thereto always played the supporting role to stars David Caruso and
Smits). Far from being simple eye candy, Schroeder's Danny
Sorenson was a guy perhaps even more conflicted than Franz's
Sipowicz. Sorenson had a great many skeletons in a great many
closets. a deeply conflicted young man who could not sustain a
promising relationship with officer Mary Franco (played with loopy
bipolarity by the brilliant Sheeri Rappaport), herself as nutty as a Clark
Bar but
whose debut, at the beginning of Schroeder's first Blue
season, held enormous promise and threatened to upstage Schroeder
and Franz. Sadly, Milch just kind of lost Franco somewhere along
the way. Franco's saucy street cop, who could go toe to toe with
Schroeder's nutso conflicted Sorenson, just kind of got lost in the
shuffle. She was ultimately replaced by the unlikely pairing of Sorenson
and Kim Delaney's Emmy-winning Dianne Russell, a move so
completely blasphemous, so ultimately scandalous, that it took on
a life of its own. An office romance gone horribly wrong that
drove Russell to leave the job and drove Sorenson into a tailspin
he never recovered from.
Delaney's exit was soon followed by James McDaniel who, I suppose,
was tired both of the ninth-hour on-set improv sessions and of
being stuck in the office answering telephones.
Schroeder's abrupt exit from the show, telegraphed
by cryptic comments in interviews that suggested he was not happy
with Milch's seat-of-the-pants style and the commute back and
forth between New York City exterior shots, the Los Angeles sound
stage and his Colorado Ranch, left the viewers as mystified as the
storyline left the cast, which I found oddly appropriate. Schroeder's exit occurred
in a cloud of confusing storylines anchored by a goateed Esai
Morales who, in three seasons, has not drummed up sufficient
gravity to hold down McDaniel's second-floor detectives'
squad office. Morales' Lieutenant Tony Rodriguez, along with Jacqueline Obradors'
Detective Rita Ortiz, both seem like guest stars on their own show
as the writing has never sufficiently served these characters up
in a meaningful or memorable way.
I whined incessantly that Bochco either didn't
want to or could not round up Detective Diane Russell to come to
Detective Danny Sorenson's funeral. It seemed odd to me that they
would even have Danny's funeral on-camera if they could not
get Diane and Sorensen's sisters there. That Captain Arthur Fancy
and Sergeant James Martinez could not appear, even in the brief
cameo before the opening credits, seemed to me like nobody tried.
I refuse to believe McDaniel and Nicholas Tuturro (who played
Martinez) were asked and they
declined to shoot one day of shaking hands in a graveyard. As a fan,
I felt cheated and abandoned, first by Schroeder (which, I
suppose, is the whole emotional point of death in the first place,
and I never really
expected him to hang around very long). The funeral scene,
however, should not have existed if the producers either could not or would
not maintain the internal logic of the series by at least having
these character show up in cameo roles.
The breakout star of the most recent cast
re-shuffling is Charlotte Ross's detective Connie McDowell, the
main reason to watch Blue if you're still watching it.
Rather than repeat myself, I'll quote myself from my
essay on
ABC's preemptive cancellation of Kim Delaney's brilliant lawyer
show Philly:
 Blue's
evolution likely includes the addition of the wonderful Charlotte
Ross, whose Detective Connie McDowell now sits at Delaney's 15th
Precinct desk. Ross has brought new harmony to the Blue dirge of Rick Schroeder's
departure— a move that threatened
to cripple the aging cop drama, as Schroeder almost
single-handedly revived the show after Jimmy Smits' departure (Smits had, in Blue tradition, saved the show after Blue
founding star David Caruso literally walked off the NYPD set
after the first season, a move so infamous, Caruso's
character's name is not permitted to be mentioned on the NYPD
set). Schroeder's replacement, Saved By The Bell's Mark-Paul
Gosselaar,
has had an entire season to show me the money, but either Gosselaar
or the NYPD writers are just firing blanks with the guy,
creating an enormous vacuum around Dennis Franz's magnetically
eccentric basket case Sipowicz. Ross has evolved, with
very Russell-like capability (McDowell was partnered with Russell
before Delaney left the show), to fill the vacancy opposite Franz and
bring a weight and meaty presence the show has been stripped off
piecemeal by the attrition of the exiting cast. Ross' McDowell
has the added benefit of being
even nuttier in her own way than Russell, as well as patiently
pursuing a puzzled and evasive Andy Sipowicz. Ross is now, for me, the
main reason to watch Blue, and Detective Russell's return might
upstage Ross, as the two characters tend to sing similar parts in the
chorus.
To be fair, it took them a minute to find
McDowell, but I will gleefully chalk up the writers' ultimate
understanding of this new post-Russell detective to the actor
herself. Frequently, actors have to make do with whatever material
is on the desk, no matter how lame (George Clooney in Batman
and Robin, anyone?). Somewhere along the way an actor provides
the writers and producers a clue, a chord, a note that inspires
the writers to work toward. Together, the actor and the writers
flesh out a memorable character and memorable moments. I thus
conclude that Ross' effectiveness as the scene-stealing McDowell owes as much to Ross herself as to whatever the writers are or are
not doing.
These are, after all, the same writers who have
not yet found Mark-Paul Gosselaar's Detective John Clark, a
character so ultimately vacant that the energy on the show just
drops whenever he walks onstage. This may or may not have much to
do with Gosselaar himself, but he's never demanded much
emotional investment from me, and I'm much more interested in what
McDowell and Sipowicz are up to. I also found myself wondering how
Bochco and Executive Producer Bill Clark could have missed the
wagon by such a country mile by NOT partnering Sipowicz with John
Clark Sr., Gosselaar's character's father played with great manic
aplomb by the brilliant Joe Spano. Spano, who played the milquetoast
Detective Goldbloom for eleven years on Bochco's groundbreaking Hill
Street Blues, has found new life in the scenery-chewing,
Sipowicz-hating "Dutch Boy," whose onscreen chemistry
with Franz threatened to dwarf anything else going on on this
steadily declining series. I'm guessing Bochco wanted to keep the
May-December thing going, fearing he'd lose the younger audience
if he paired 50-ish Franz with 50-ish Spano. But NBC's Law
& Order doesn't seem to care much about those kinds of
concerns as they give us a heaping helping of middle-aged
detectives week after week. Sipowicz-Clark Sr., partnered up,
would have given this show a completely new spin and new life. As
it is, Spano is suffering the Mary Franco Syndrome: brilliant initial
episodes followed by months and months of not knowing how to get
the best out of these terrific actors.
 While
the show managed to survive Detective John
Kelley's railroading off of the series (David Caruso's character
was transferred to motor pool and thus resigned in disgust rather
than wait for his inevitable drumming off the force in the wake of his having helped
ex-lover Officer Janice Licalsi (Family Law's Amy Brenenan)
avoid murder charges), and Detective Bobby Simone's' death from
multiple complications of heart surgery (in brilliant medical hegemony,
Simone's tragic death began with a simple mistake at a routine
visit to his dentist; an infection which eventually attacked his
heart, requiring a transplant which created enormous other
complications he ultimately could not overcome), and even
Detective Danny
Sorenson's extremely unsatisfying, volatile manic highs and lows
an ultimate disappearance while working undercover at a strip
joint— I doubt the show will survive the ultimate blandness,
sameness, and spectacular evenness of its current
incarnation.
Blue has become, most terribly, a (gasp)
TV Show. NYPD Blue was never just a TV Show.
It transcended such labeling, and defied even descriptions like
"edgy" or "daring." It was its own animal,
mirroring, I suppose, Milch's own tempestuous life. The last time Blue
was actually daring was, oddly, the documentary, Inside NYPD Blue: A
Decade On The Job,
which aired just before the September 24th season opener. Bochco presented an hour-long retrospective of the show that was
almost completely candid and unblinking in its assessment of the show's highs
and lows. With unprecedented frankness that seemed to
almost rattle Jimmy Smits (who taped a new interview for the
show), the cast and crew told (not surprisingly) the highs of the
series but, in a move I can only label as brave, Bochco and
the network allowed them to discuss, in unusually frank terms, the
lows of the series. Most notoriously, David Caruso's
tempestuous first season and his volatile exit— now the stuff of
Hollywood legend as he sailed right into an obscurity he is only
now beginning to emerge from with his stone-faced CSI: Miami—
and David Milch's manic run as head writer.
Detective Andy Sipowicz was David Milch.
Milch was a hard-drinking guy chased by his own demons; demons
that regularly drove him to the NYPD set and made Milch and
the actors and producers miserable. NYPD was, frequently,
not a happy set or a happy place to be, and Bochco, to his credit,
let all of that hang out in the retrospective, warts and all,
without blinking or sugaring things up. I was a little surprised
Caruso was not included in the new interviews, but then, from what
I've read, the wound continues to fester with Bochco, even though
Caruso's public statements pull up short of an apology while
acknowledging he could have handled things better back in those
days.
Milch himself appears on the retrospective,
repentant but still clearly nuts, as he hangs himself the highest
and the first, falling on his sword for his behavior which ran Smits
(and, by reading between the lines, we'd guess Schroeder) off of
the series. It is fair to assume Delaney left because Bochco was
developing Philly for her, Andrea Thompson, whose Detective
Jill Kirkendall single-handedly dominated Blues'
seventh season, left to become a correspondent and hopeful anchor
for CNN (creating enormous controversy among the news purists who
decried this actor trying to become a journalist; an argument I find
laughable in a medium dominated by Stone Phillips-ish good hair
and plastic news anchors), and McDaniel and Nicholas Tuturro (who
played the
boyish James Martinez) departed because there wasn't enough for
them to do.
Gosselaar's arrival in the 2001 season opener,
showed a lot of promise. OCCB Narcotics officer John Clark, Jr.
initially calls Sipowicz an a-hole in their early encounter, and
the two-hour season opener, while not quite up to Blue's
best, held promise. The conflict between Sipowicz and Joe Spano's
Detective John Clark, Sr. held the most promise of all. I was
riveted to my TV screen every week to see what would develop
between these two. Not much has. The writers either don't want to
pair these guys up, don't have an idea of how to do it, or are afraid
of the shifting demographics if they minimize Gosselaar and hunky
Henry Simmons— whose Detective Baldwin Jones has not once risen
to the level of James McDaniel's Lieutenant Fancy. Jones' most
frequent emotion is frustration; he seems frustrated all the time,
and my guess would be Simmons has to be frustrated as well. They
simply have no idea what to do with him. he seems frequently the
odd man out, even more so than Gordon Clapp's brilliant Greg
Medavoy. Once a complex character with his own storylines and
subplots, Medavoy is now routinely played for comic relief. I am
chagrined that he and Baldwin are frequently set adrift as just
odd voices in the chorus.
After a promising start by virtually
channeling, note for note, Veronica Hammel's seasoned, mature, all-too-serious Public Defender/Assistant District Attorney Joyce Davenport from Hill Street Blues (she even began her stint wearing Davenport's trademark long haircut),
Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon's Assistant District attorney Valerie
Haywood has been completely lost in the crowd. They have no idea
whatsoever what to do with her, and she has, by all appearances,
been cut back to a recurring role.
The 2001 season was lackluster to boring to the
greatest crime of all: dull. The season finale, a 2-hour stretch
of a yawner wherein the detectives search frantically for a
missing child, was so dull and lifeless, I feared the show would
not be here for the 2002 season. But, here we are, with Blue
actually starting on time— a rarity for this show, whose start
date seemed to have always been pushed back farthest of the fall
season openers (the 2000 season not even starting until January of
2001— the latest "fall" season premier on record, as
Bochco warred with ABC over the network's refusal to move the
soapy Once & Again out of Blue's time slot. Again
spiraled into cancellation once Bochco won the war and bumped the
show from its Tuesday berth). The most interesting thing from the
past season was Sipowicz's attempts to skate away from Ross'
Detective Connie McDowell, a woman half Sipowicz's age but twice
his emotional maturity. Heading into the '02 season, I hoped the
show would shake off of it's post-Milch doldrums, and that Ross's
naked butt would make its debut as the show finally gave the
emotionally ravaged Andy Sipowicz some better times while (he
prays) partnering Sipowicz not with Gosselaar's lightweight Clark
Jr. but with Spano's meatier Clark Sr. (who has, at this writing,
apparently been recruited into Internal Affairs and hates
Sipowicz as much as Captain Pat Fraker, Clark Sr.'s Internal Affairs
handler—played with smarmy
aplomb by Casey Siemaszko— does). These cards on the table, I, as a
writer, would be filled with endless possibilities for good shows.
Six episodes in, I'm still waiting for any of
those possibilities to mesh into something worth watching. Baldwin
is stalked by Tanya Wright's bubbly Officer Maya Anderson, an aggressive saucy gal from
anti-crime and exactly
the wrong kind of gal for him, considering the weightier presence
of Beauvais-Nilon. Wright fairly screams boiling bunny, but
Baldwin ends up in the sack with her anyway, and I'm thinking, hoo-boy,
here we go, as Rodriguez gets sacked because of the squabbles
between all of the in-house romances. But the Baldwin-Maya
involvement goes nowhere and has no meaning or lasting purpose,
as Maya left the show in last night's episode. So, what
was that all about?
Medavoy has been given exactly nothing to do
this season whatsoever. Last season's best moment with him was his
being too distracted to remember to search a man brought in for
questioning, who in turn takes Sipowicz hostage (the only time the
needle swung over towards the right side of the meter last
season). Beauvais-Nilon is mostly a no-show: my guess, either off shooting
more awful films like last year's dud Bad Company, or perhaps she
has a baby or something, but she is clearly not around much. Esai
Morales does nothing whatsoever but sit in his office and emote
and repress anger. Last night he and Franz had a little blow up in
a pale attempt at the bombast between Franz and McDaniel (Sipowicz
and his boss had a tough time going, even coming to blows in
Schroeder's second episode, a high water mark for the series with
tour de force performances by nearly the entire cast—
gosh, do I miss Andrea Thompson).
 Gosselaar just wanders around looking
concerned, pupils dilating, chin set and teeth clenched, but I get
nothing from this guy. Neither does Franz, who seems lost with no
one
to play off of. Gosselaar is simply not a good enough actor to
bounce off of Sipowicz the way Schroeder did, Schroeder frequently
upstaging Franz and pushing Franz to be more Franzish. Obradors'
Detective Ortiz is practically non-existent: they have given her
nothing whatsoever to do this season. And the Connie-Andy romance,
so promising with Sipowicz's endlessly entertaining discomfort
last season, has hit the skids of normalcy and complacency: the
two of them apparently coming to terms during the show's
summer hiatus. Instead of showing us this process, Bochco and head
writer Bill Clark have chosen to go off into this business of
Connie's sister (some new character out of the Blue), who
is ultimately murdered by her husband and leaves a child for
Connie and, presumably, Andy to raise. Which is all well and good,
but the show is not finding anything for its central cast to do.
Bringing in outside characters like Connie's sister seemed an
enormous waste of screen time, especially while Obradors is just
hanging out in the coffee room and Morales spends entire episodes
just adjusting his tie.
I could take the show being weird. I could even
take the show being bad: every show has its highs and lows. What I
can't take is the show being dull. There is no greater crime in broadcasting than boring your audience, and NYPD Blue
is, finally, boring me. Bochco and Clark have either lost interest
in the show or can't remember how to make it work anymore. Or,
maybe they just don't know any good writers. Fellas, if you're
listening, I would kill to write this show, if I could
write it more the way it was at its very best. Hollywood politics
being what hey are, by the time I got a shot at the script, the
series will have been off the air half a dozen years, but, man, I
can dream, right? All I am seeing this season are missed
opportunities and a plodding dullness that suggests writer's block
or writer's dementia. The present crop of writers either don't
know who these characters are or honestly have no clue what to do
with them. Last season was bad. This season is dull.
Much as I hate to see shows go out on a
whimper, the fact is most shows do (Archie Bunker's Place,
anyone?). Sadly, Blue likely will not be the exception to
this rule, as the staggering lameness of this season is
surely to attract the attention of the cancellation goons at ABC
who may think ten seasons is a nice round number to end things at.
Which is truly sad, considering NBC's Law & Order is
not only still going strong after thirteen seasons, but has spawned
seemingly endless spin-offs. Blue's one attempt at a
spin-ff was the given-up-on-before-it-really-had-a-chance Brooklyn
South, a Blue clone that dealt with the uniform patrol
rather than the detectives.
I am deeply saddened by how lame this show has
become, by this waste of talent. As a writer, I'm often offended
when the script is, apparently, the weakest link in a production
because, to me, that says the people in charge are giving short
shrift to my profession. Most people think they can write, think
anybody can write, and think writers are interchangeable and
disposable. When, in fact, the writing is the life blood of the
production. The production values of NYPD Blue remain high,
and the ensemble is a good one, composed of talented actors. The
production staff and crew seem to all be top-flight folks. So, why
on earth are they letting the writing go to hell? There is
absolutely no point to rallying all of that fire power and budget
and then fall asleep at the switch when it comes to the writing.
Hey, Blue, give me a call.
In the meantime, I suppose I will continue
taping on inertia, hoping the show will pull out of this tailspin,
but I am not overly optimistic about the show's chances. The
wheels have come completely off of the wagon this season, and
worse than being bad, the show is criminally dull.
I think it's
time for me to collar up.
Christopher J. Priest
30 October 2002
philly
 Postscript:
I Guess They Showed Me
Blue
hit a new low in early March when it broadcast a completely
gratuitous nude scene with the brilliant Charlotte Ross where her common-law step
son walks in on her in the shower. An amusing enough scene that might have
been more fun than offensive had the scene had anything whatsoever to do
with the episode that followed it. Instead, the show went on to its usual
dead-end rut of meaningless cases, aping NBC's much more interesting
Law & Order, I suppose, while missing the point that Blue has
never been about the cases so much as about the people solving them.
Last week, the show wrapped up a very complex and emotionally promising
but terribly managed storyline about a corrupt cop who goes way over the
edge by resolving the most interesting plot of the season (the bad cop sets
up Gosselaar's Clark Jr.) in the first moments of the show and then going
on to the boring casework. I was stunned that this terrific subplot went
absolutely nowhere and that the episode in which it was resolved concerned
the subplot only tangentially, like the producers just threw their hands
up. Similarly, Kim Delaney's sweeps month reprise of her Diane Russell character
proved to be painfully much ado about nothing
(I suspect Delaney's personal troubles keep getting her bounced
from series to series, most recently from the runaway train CSI:
Miami, originally billed as a two-fer with Delaney and fellow
Blue alumni David Caruso).
And, finally, with the death of
Joe Spano's Detective John Clark, Sr., it is now official: these people have
absolutely no idea what they are doing. The show has completely lost its
way and the wheels have come all the way off of the wagon. Spano, who
played series lead Dennis Franz's main foil (and father to Franz's
partner), was easily one of the best things about the show. Why, oh why,
on earth they never bothered to partner Spano's Detective John Clark, Sr.
with Franz's Sipowicz (preferring, I suppose, to mindlessly pursue the
younger demographic with Mark-Paul Gosselaar's lifeless and bland John
Jr.) is beyond me.
 Blue was put on hiatus (perhaps a
reaction to how lousy the show's been, the Ross scene, or both),
replaced by the atrociously bad reality show The Family.
Susan Lyne, president, ABC Entertainment, favors reality shows
over dramas (or, frankly, intelligent programming). This is the
genius who cancelled the scarbrously funny Denis Leary vehicle
The Job, Delaney's previous and quite good series Philly,
the soaper Once & Again, and lots of other good stuff
to make room for dreck like Star Search, America's Greatest
Kids, and other wholly unwatchable stuff. Lyne, who, sadly,
seems secure in her job, has transformed ABC into the trailer
trash of network TV. I'm shocked she renewed Blue, as I was
certain Blue's weak storylines would be more than incentive
enough for Lyne to cancel it in favor of When FedEx Men
Collide. Lyne is the George W. Bush of network programming.
The woman is an onion.
Blue returned with
promisingly stronger episodes, dropping unproductive storylines and
sending a few useless characters packing (including, unfortunately, Tanya
Wright's Officer Maya Anderson, whose fatal attraction to Detective Jones
had a very high creep-out factor and tons of potential bunny-boiling fun).
I'm not sure if Spano's exit was Bochco's idea or Spano's, the actor
tiring of his character's downward spiral. For a minute, it looked as if
the show was turning a corner. But just for a minute. The season ended on
a downer of a cliffhanger, with Esai Morales' Lieutenant Rodriguez being
shot by Casey Siemaszko's drunken IAB Captain Fraker, a moment that would
have been riveting had it been James McDaniel's brilliant Lieutenant
Arthur Fancy and Scott Allan Campbell's scene-chewing Sergeant Martens. It
all struck me as too little far too late, a perhaps desperate attempt to
convince us the show is worth coming back to next fall.
ABC has renewed Blue for
another season, so what do I know? I fear the
series glides along on sheer momentum. It is a shadow if its
former self, and, yee, it's really time to put this show out of
its misery.
Christopher J. Priest
5 July 2003
Research courtesy of Alan Sepinwall's NYPD Blue
Page.
NYPD BLUE images courtesy of nypdblue.org.
TOP
OF PAGE
Images Copyright © 2003 ABC Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Text Copyright © 2007 Grace Phonogram eMedia. All Rights Reserved.
|