By getting ABC to agree to a list of profane words that were acceptable-if not used to excess-Bochco hastened the rush of commercial TV producers to compete with the booming popularity of HBO and its fellow cable networks. By winning the battle to include nudity, a major step was taken that other dramatic shows cautiously followed. True enough, but what NYPD Blue did do was revolutionize broadcast television standards. “We’re not doing anything that’s going to bring down the fall of the Republic,” he said. In a rather testy press conference that July, Bochco blamed the press for blowing up the controversy. As producer Bochco explained when I asked him about it, they didn’t cut what we saw, just how long we saw it. Some warned they wouldn’t clear the series at all for their stations.Įventually, a new pilot was produced, trimming 15 seconds of nudity from the bedroom scene. A large number of ABC stations complained they wouldn’t show that episode unless significant changes were made. Though little publicized at the time, it eventually came out that NYPD Blue had required all its actors to sign “nudity clauses” in their contracts, guaranteeing no disputes over being asked to appear in such scenes.Īfter the ABC affiliates convention that year, a furor began that quickly equaled and surpassed the one over ABC’s raunchy comedy series Soap in 1977. Well, that was certainly something you didn’t hear on broadcast television in 1993, even after 10 pm.Īs the pilot rolled on, things got even more envelope-punchy as Detective John Kelly (David Caruso) and Officer Janice Licalsi (Amy Brenneman) made love for the first time-and we saw parts of their naked bodies never before seen in a commercial network prime time program. “Ipso this,” said Sipowicz, clutching at his crotch, “you pissy little bitch!” On the way out of the courthouse, she mumbles her displeasure and Sipowicz rather flagrantly expressed his own. Detective Sipowicz had just infuriated prosecutor Sylvia Costas (Sharon Lawrence) by ruining her case against a mobster with contaminated evidence. I remember grinning broadly when I first sat down to preview the pilot episode of NYPD Blue in the spring of 1993 and realized Bochco and partner David Milch had punched holes in the envelope in less than five minutes. Doing a conventional police show built around a star name no longer seemed practical. Cable TV networks like HBO and Showtime were now doing weekly series-and doing them without the inhibitions of regulated broadcast networks. The handheld camera style gave us the feeling we were visiting a real New York police precinct where each frame seemed crammed with suspects in handcuffs or anonymous uniformed officers in blue.īut television had undergone a major sea change since the run of Hill Street from 1981-87. Like Hill Street, it had a unique visual presentation -darker, busier and real. In the fall of 1993, when NYPD Blue began its run, it seemed most like a natural extension of writer-producer Steven Bochco’s experiments with Hill Street Blues, the most innovative and groundbreaking police show of the 1980s. He had become a metaphor for the contemporary urban policeman who, after conquering his own demons, still has to face the daunting challenge of a bureaucracy that seems programmed to thwart justice at every turn. It was a fitting final image for the acclaimed police drama, which ultimately had evolved into a show mainly about Sipowicz. ĪBC’s NYPD Blue ended its 12-year, 261-episode run with new homicide squad commander Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) sitting alone at his cluttered desk, facing an uncertain future, wondering perhaps how he ever wound up supervising the conduct of others after so much trouble supervising his own. L-R: David Caruso as Detective John Kelly and Dennis Franz as Detective Andy Sipowicz in the 1993 premiere season of NYPD Blue. A troubled protagonist, gritty language, and a pair of bare buns changed the way America viewed TV cop shows forever.
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