America Has Changed Since "NYPD Blue" Aired

ABC's prestige cop drama premiered 30 years ago this week. It was a different time.

Photo by Jalen Banks on Unsplash

Over at Rolling Stone, Alan Sepinwall serves up a wonderful retrospective of NYPD Blue,¹ the Stephen Bochco-David Mills cop drama that premiered on ABC thirty years ago this week. When it first aired, the show’s title was an intentional double entendre. It not only referred to the New York Police Department, but also the show’s wider latitude for adult content. As cable was starting to eat into the broadcast networks’ ability to attract viewers, Bochco and Milch were allowed to be more edgy in what they said and showed.² It was controversial enough at the time for the American Family Association to call for a boycott of it and for a quarter of all ABC affiliates to not carry the show in its first season. The show’s high quality and strong ratings undercut that boycott quickly.

Of course, what seemed “edgy” in the 1990s seems tame in the 2020s. That said, there are a lot of things that were shown on NYPD Blue that probably would not make it on air today. And therein lies a tale of how the country has changed, for better or worse.

Sepinwall effectively summarized his take on the show as follows: “it's one of the most influential dramas ever made, with an unmistakable but complicated legacy, and an all-timer performance from Dennis Franz.” Sepinwall correctly notes that David Caruso had his breakout role as Detective John Kelly, and was then replaced by a magnetic Jimmy Smits as Detective Bobby Simone — but Franz dominated the show due to his towering portrayal of recovering alcoholic Detective Andy Sipowicz. Franz had a lot of help from a variety of supporting actors, including James McDaniel as Lieutenant Arthur Fancy, Gordon Clapp as sad sack detective Greg Medavoy, Nicholas Turturro as James Martinez, and Kim Delaney as Detective Diane Russell. The cast and guest-stars throughout the show’s run were impeccable. Character actors ranging from Richard Schiff to Bradley Whitford to Tony Todd to Melina Kanakaredes to Pedro Pascal to Christopher Meloni had their moments in the sun.³ At its best, Milch’s dialogue in NYPD Blue had a blue-collar poetry that you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else on the small screen.⁴

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is more interested in the politics of NYPD Blue and how the show’s depiction of policing and race land differently today. Conceived during the crime boom of the early 1990s, the show’s pilot made it clear how heroic cops felt about being hamstrung by the legal system in their pursuit of justice. In the show’s pilot, Kelly talks down a grieving father who holds a judge hostage because of the lenient sentence given to his son’s killer. After Kelly persuades him to surrender, he turns to the judge and says, “Don’t tell me how you govern. I work your streets, I clean up after how you govern. The way you govern stinks.”

In a later first-season episode, Kelly mentors Martinez about what he would be willing to do to get a confession. He flat-out tells Martinez that he would “tune up” a suspect if he was sure he was guilty, Constitution be damned:

This was the beginning of a long line of heroic 15th precinct detectives beating the crap out of suspects to elicit a confession.⁵ Unconstitutional? Of course, but the thing is that all the “skels” were guilty. I did not watch every episode of NYPD Blue but I saw a fair number of them and I cannot remember a time when a detective beat up a suspect and it turns out they had the wrong guy.⁶ In this way, the show was a prime example of what the youths today call “copaganda.” In the same way that 24 relied on a ticking time-bomb scenario to justify torture, NYPD Blue presented its detectives as omniscient and unbiased enough to justify beatings.⁷

Where NYPD Blue was more interesting was in its depiction of race and redemption. To put it gently, Andy Sipowicz was not shy about his prejudices. In one early episode Sipowicz tells Fancy, “You think I’m a racist… I’m entitled to my feelings and my opinion so long as I do my job the right way.” That was merely the first in a whole series of set-tos between Fancy and Sipowicz. Their constant jawing at each other led to Simone yelling at both of them in frustration and the inevitable physical altercation.

As uncomfortable and awkward as many of those scenes were, they served a larger narrative arc for the show: belief in the power of redemption. Sipowicz’s personal and professional journey over the course of the series was far from seamless — he relapsed multiple times when confronted with personal tragedies. Nonetheless, the arc of Sipowicz bended towards self-improvement. Professionally, he went from bigoted drunk to wise captain of the squad. Personally, he evolved from misanthrope to loving father and husband. That this was at all believable is a credit to Dennis Franz. He was able to show Sipowicz’s worst instincts while also displaying a fumbling and awkward yearning for human decency. Franz showed Andy’s gratitude and wonder that his life ended up as cozy as it did.

Television shows and character arcs about redemption are my weakness — see, for example, Richie in The Bear. But I seriously doubt whether a racist character like Sipowicz could be portrayed today the way he was back then. There’s no way Sipowicz’s character arc would be anything but polarizing. In the 15th precinct, every other character has to help Andy out while demonstrating superhuman self-restraint in the process.⁸

After its first season, NYPD Blue’s central premise was that Andy was worth saving, and that it was right and good for the other characters to save him. Franz’s performance made that premise gripping television in the 1990s. I’m just not sure it would fly in 2023. There would be a lot of complaints about the minority characters not being given deeper interior lives. Sipowicz would have been cancelled after the pilot.

I get these reactions, but I will confess to having some feelings about them. The critique of copaganda is cogent, and it’s altogether good and appropriate to expect more out of white people in the 21st century. Still, in a weird way NYPD Blue offered a more optimistic portrayal of human behavior than we would see in a similar prestige drama today. Sepinwall notes that Sipowicz begat the antiheroes of Peak TV, the likes of Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White. The difference, however, is that those characters did not evolve into better people — if anything, they regressed and broke bad.

In today’s more polarized environment, I don’t know if a mainstream audience can buy a character who starts out bigoted and ends up being a more constructive member of society. For progressives, the initial racism would be too much; for conservatives, it would be viewed as woke culture run amok. Which is a shame — because the United States could use more characters like Andy Sipowicz. The country is littered with flawed human beings trying to be better. However the show has aged, NYPD Blue understood that compelling point.

1. At the time of this writing, all 12 seasons are available at Hulu and Prime.

2. The words “bitch” and “asshole” were tossed around a lot. A lot of naked butts were put on display. It is entirely possible that NYPD Blue invented sideboob.

3. The year before he broke out on Friends, David Schwimmer had a great four-episode arc as a nebbishy neighbor of Detective Kelly who embraces vigilantism and faces a reckoning for it. In some alternate universe, Schwimmer’s career is filled with arresting portrayals of weak villains.

4. At its worst, the dialogue suggested Milch was winging it at the last minute, which made the show ripe for parody.

5. There was one episode where Medavoy outwits a crazy skel into confessing, and it’s treated by everyone in the squad as nothing short of a miracle.

6. The rare time NYPD Blue acknowledged the possibility of mistaken identity was unintentionally hilarious — because of course it was Sipowicz’s son was falsely arrested.

7. Interrogations were not this show’s strong suit — especially compared to Homicide: Life on the Street or Law & Order.

8. McDaniel did not get a ton to do as Fancy, but he excelled at portraying an African-American facing pressure from all sides — the community, his squad, and his superiors.