After my disagreement with the British ‘Office’ I decided to move back to something from US soil. I’d heard a podcast a while back between Bill Simmons and Tim Goodman where they discussed their favorite TV seasons of all time. Both had the first season of ‘NYPD Blue’ on their lists, and since I have never watched the show, I decided that would be a good choice. (My other option was the 4th season of ‘The Wire’ but since I’ve watched a season of ‘The Wire’ before and have never seen ‘NYPD Blue’ I decided to go with the show I had no history with and therefore could go in with a clean slate
NYPD Blue – Season 1 – Episode 1: Pilot
Original airdate (episode 4): March 19, 1985
The episode starts by throwing us right into the middle of a case. Here was see a detective, Andy Sipowicz (played by Dennis Franz) being examined over his arrest of a suspected mobster. The case is thrown out, and the ensuing plot follows Sipowicz as he gets drunk, threatens the mobster, and eventually gets shot. His partner, detective John Kelly (played by David Caruso) shakes things up at various mob-run businesses in the hopes of getting them to help turn over the one who shot Sipowicz. He’s also going through a divorce, and is trying to force himself to move on.
The first episode was fantastic. It was well written, well paced, and handled all the characters perfectly. A show like ‘Moonlighting’ gets bogged down with more than four characters, because they don’t know how to introduce them where we learned anything about them. They also put too much emphasis on the characters that had minor to no importance to the plot of show and this took away the chance of building on the characters that were important. NYPD Blue handled all the characters perfectly. You quickly formed opinions on them simply based on the dialog or scenes, and none of the scenes were pointless. The plot itself was interesting and easy to follow without being too complicated, which shows these days tend to be. Hopefully the rest of the season can retain this level of entertainment and that this isn’t simply a case of a pilot being reworked until perfect and then the rest of the series falling off as the scripts get rushed out. ‘ER’ premiered in 1994, the following season, and I see now how much ‘ER’ borrowed from ‘NYPD Blue’. It’s interesting that feel as though ‘ER’ gets more credit in television history than Blue, and I wonder if that’s because Blue got too much negative attention due to the nudity, which is really too bad. Obviously both shows were very popular, and I could be remembering things differently, I just feel as though this series is being forgotten as time passes and that’s too bad.
Before watching this show, I was curious about how I would appreciate David Caruso’s role. Honestly I assumed he would be no different than he is on CSI:Miami, but he actually is. He’s not a great actor by any means, but the fact that he actually shows emotion and humility surprised me. Where did it all go wrong with him? Obviously he’s the reason CSI:Miami is unwatchable. I don’t know a single person, regardless of age, gender, or intellect that enjoys his performance on that show. At what point did he decide that all emotions were that stoic staring performance that he deliverers in every scene. It almost angers me. While actors such as George Clooney figured it out and got better and better over time, he got worse to the point that all he’s doing is staring and delivering lines. I’m interested to see if he starts mailing it in during ‘NYPD Blue’.
As for the nudity, I guess this was just a way to get people to watch the show. I remember at the time everyone talked about it before hand, but I don’t remember how it was received. How I receive it now is that it was ridiculous. It was obviously just stuck in there to grow a controversy, which is unfortunate because the show stood on it’s own fine. I won’t venture to guess whether more people tuned in to see the nudity and loved the rest of the show or if more people didn’t tune in and missed out on a great show, but I will stand by my statement that it was unnecessary. The big scene was a sex scene that consisted of the same butt being shown as the woman (Amy Brenneman playing Officer Janice Licalsi) rolled off and on and back off of Caruso. It was especially ridiculous since that’s all it was, rolling off and back on him. Sheesh, if you’re going to create a controversy over a little butt nudity, at least make the scene enjoyable. Regardless, it was unnecessary.
So, in conclusion, I’m very glad I chose ‘NYPD Blue’. I’m already excited for the second episode thanks to two cliffhangers, one of which I honestly didn’t see coming (officer Janice Licalsi is tied to the mob!). I hope the rest of the first season keeps up this quality, and I have feeling it does. This is much, much better than ‘Moonlighting’.
