NYPD Too: Part One
There are eight million cop shows in the Naked City.
Blue Bloods, which comes to the Paley Center Monday, October 16, for the sold-out closing-night event of PaleyFest NY 2017, just launched its eighth season on CBS. By virtue of endurance alone, the show has earned a spot in the pantheon of television programs about New York City cops alongside such distinguished fare as NYPD Blue, the Law & Order franchise, Naked City, Kojak, Barney Miller, and McCloud. Someday we will have a bake-off between NY and LA cop shows (Dragnet, Southland, The Shield, yada yada), but that day isn’t today.
We have our own favorites among the New York shows. These are their stories.
All of these programs are available in the Paley Center collection.
Read Part Two.
The Naked City/Naked City (1958–1959/1960–1963)
The television version of Naked City, which aired on ABC from 1958–1959 and again, after a season’s hiatus, from 1960–1963, was spawned by the 1948 feature film The Naked City (the original name of the TV series as well). Naked City was a cop show that distrusted authority, with numerous episodes penned by left-leaning writers (in some cases, by onetime blacklistees) sensitive to the struggles of the downtrodden. In contrast to conventional action-adventure series, in which conflict was typically settled with gunfights or fisticuffs, Naked City raised problems that often weren’t solved at all, like poverty, prejudice, drug addiction, abortion, capital punishment, and other issues of public policy. The title The Naked City was lifted from a 1945 collection of photos by New York shutterbug Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee, famed for his stark, black-and-white depictions of Gotham life. Veteran film and TV actor Lawrence Dobkin narrates the opening of almost every one of the series’ 138 episodes, and closes each with the film’s familiar tagline: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” Critic David Boroff once called Naked City: “Chekhovian in its rueful gaze at people in the clutch of disaster.”
Up-and-coming East Coast actors flocked to the series, including Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Jon Voight, Sandy Dennis, William Shatner, Dustin Hoffman, Peter Fonda, and Diahann Carroll, as did older, more established performers like Mickey Rooney, Eli Wallach, Burgess Meredith, Jack Warden, Claude Rains, Lee J. Cobb, Maureen Stapleton, Walter Matthau, and even famed acting teacher Sanford Meisner.
In a stunning third-season episode titled “Which Is Joseph Creeley?” — one of the very few without narration—Martin Balsam guest-stars as Creeley, who, having shot and killed a shopkeeper during a jewelry-store holdup, is sentenced to die in the electric chair. During his incarceration, doctors discover a massive brain tumor that might have accounted for his instability; once the tumor is removed, Creeley seems a changed man, with no recollection of the crime. Adam Flint (Paul Burke), as the arresting officer, grows increasingly close to Creeley, and sympathizes with him at his retrial. A doctor on the witness stand is asked if Creeley could have been considered sane before the operation: “Sanity,” he replies, “is a relative term.” In the end there is no ending, as the episode comes to a conclusion before the jury announces its decision. As Naked City asserted weekly, it was more important to raise the questions than to answer them.
The Marcus-Nelson Murders (1973)
We love ya, baby. The Marcus-Nelson Murders, scripted by industry giant Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg), was the two-hour-plus pilot for CBS-TV’s Kojak, and like the series starred chrome-domed Telly Savalas as NYPD Detective Lieutenant Theo Kojak (though here spelled Kojack). While the series had its moments, the television movie is epic; based on a book by famed Gotham newshawk Selwyn Raab, it is a fictionalized account of the infamous “Career Girl Murders” of 1963, in which two twentysomething women — one the daughter of TV writer Max Wylie and niece of author/screenwriter Philip Wylie — were stabbed to death in their Upper East Side apartment.
In real life, Raab helped clear the suspect (as he later did for falsely convicted murder Rubin “Hurricane” Carter), whom police had coerced into making a false confession (the police abuse was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court when issuing its landmark Miranda-rights ruling in 1966, and by the New York State Legislature in abolishing capital punishment in 1965); in the movie it’s Kojack who rides to the rescue, shattering the blue wall of silence when details in the confession don’t add up. According to Mann, Marlon Brando wanted to play Kojack, but Universal wouldn’t let him — this was just before The Godfather came out, and Brando’s career had ebbed. In the same interview, Mann says that when shooting in Harlem, the filmmakers had to pay off gang members to keep them from dropping bricks on their heads from tenement high-rises.
The Police Tapes (1977)
Following the success of the landmark 1973 PBS documentary An American Family, husband-and-wife filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond spent three months following around coppers from the Forty-fourth Precinct in the South Bronx, a one-and-two-tenths-square-mile area with, at the time, the highest crime rate in the city— this was during the summer of 1976, a time when New York was, in the words of Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, “careening toward bankruptcy,” and gripped in spiritual crisis. The cops deal with everything from the Black Liberation Army to family disputes (in one, a sixty-nine-year-old mother attacks her daughter in the face with an ax, perturbed that she had woken her up) to crap games in the street (an “eyesore,” one patrolman calls it) to homicides, not to mention lots of tacky seventies clothing. And the Raymonds are there to capture all of it, winding up with forty hours of footage (eventually edited into a ninety-minutes program for WNET) using early-iteration video recorders that had just started migrating to America from Japan, like the PortaPak.
The Police Tapes had a huge influence on fictional television and films, including Hill Street Blues (witness the briefing scene, which ends not with “Let’s be careful out there,” but “Let’s be careful on the street”) and Homicide: Life on the Street, which loved to film the back of policemen’s heads as they chatted in their cars, as the Raymonds do here, plus Fox’s reality series Cops and the 1981 theatrical film Fort Apache, The Bronx.
The star of this show is Bronx Borough Commander Anthony Bouza, who cites B.F. Skinner and Aristotle in demonstrating a profound understanding of the sociological and psychological roots of urban crime, as well as his own role in it: “The levels of rage and frustration have created an emotional gorge that people are permanently endowed with in the ghetto. … To the degree that I succeed in keeping it cool, in keeping the ghetto cool, to the degree that I can be effective, to that degree, fundamentally am I deflecting America’s discovery of this cancer? And the longer it is deferred, the discovery, as in Vietnam, the greater the moral dilemma, the greater the problem when it is ultimately discovered. So maybe I would be better off failing.”
The Job (2001–2002)
Writer/producer/star Denis Leary based this single-camera herky-jerky-filmed comedy (cocreated with Peter Tolan) on the “totally messed up” personal life of a real NYPD detective, Mike Charles, whom he had met while filming The Thomas Crown Affair (Charles was technical consultant, on both the film and the series). Leary’s fictional iteration of Charles, Mike McNeil, had, in the words of his partner, Terrence “Pip” Phillips (Bill Nunn), personal issues of “biblical” proportion, including excessive smoking, drinking, and pill-popping, plus cheating on his wife, but he was a good cop with a heart of gold, fortified by a palisade of cynicism. “If there’s something wrong on the inside, why do I look so good on the outside?” McNeil asks. “Because you’re Satan?” Pip answers.
Critics loved the show— PopMatters said it stripped away the “veneer of the sanitized, saccharin ‘reality’ that characterizes so much of today’s television comedy” — but viewers didn’t, at least not enough of them. The Job premiered in the spring of 2001 with six episodes; initially scheduled to return the following September, it was delayed until the January 2002 due to the the terrorist attacks of 9/11, ironic given the subject matter of Leary’s next show, Rescue Me. A total of just nineteen episodes aired before the show was canceled: criminal, and unjust.
Life on Mars (2008–2009)
It was the freakiest show: Working a case in 2008, NYPD homicide detective Sam Tyler (Jason O’Mara) is hit by a speeding police car . . . and wakes up in 1973. Yes, a time-traveling cop show. The good news is he gets to read Kim Jong-il’s On the Art of Cinema hot off the press; the bad news is he has no idea how he got there, or how to get back. Adapted from the hit BBC show of the same name, the U.S. version lasted a paltry seventeen episodes, but the good die young, and that’s exactly what happened to ABC’s Life on Mars. The ensemble cast — including The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli, Boardwalk Empire’s Gretchen Mol, and, as Gene Hunt, the commander of the 125 Precinct’s detective squad, the great Harvey Keitel — is terrific. The original, unaired version of the pilot (available on YouTube), scripted by David E. Kelley and featuring Colm Meaney in the Hunt role, was set and shot in L.A., but ABC nixed it, and production was moved to New York. SPOILER ALERT: The final episode seems to reveals that Tyler is, in reality, an astronaut heading to Mars, and that everything viewers had seen up to that point was merely virtually reality, but maybe not.
Read part two of our survey of brilliant New York City cop shows!
Paley Matters is a publication of The Paley Center for Media.
David Bushman has been a television curator at the Paley Center since 1992, excluding a two-year stint as program director at TV Land. He is the coauthor of Twin Peaks FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About a Place Both Wonderful and Strange (2016) and the upcoming Buffy the Vampire Slayer FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Sunnydale’s Slayer of Vampires, Demons, and Other Forces of Darkness (2017).
