Brooklyn South – The Complete Series

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B-     Extras: C+     Episodes: B

 

 

Are there too many police shows on TV?  No one since Jack Webb has done more to show the police in action than Steven Bochco and his exceptionally talented group of writers.  Though it was limited by censorship of the time, the Mary Tyler Moore Productions-backed Hill Street Blues may have been a slow burn of a show, but it set new standards on TV for realism and made all the networks rethink their audiences.  This was just in time for the onslaught of Cable & Satellite TV, as demographics (for better or worse) could support a show in a way a general ratings number could not.

 

This did not help all of Bochco’s shows become hits, like NYPD Blue managed to be, but CBS decided they would try a Bochco show while ABC had that Bochco hit on their hands.  The result was Brooklyn South, one of Bochco’s best shows.  There are too many shows on TV, police and otherwise, that tell us how “Godly good” public servants in authority and/or with the power of life and death over the populous, are, but this show backed it up realistically without pandering to its audience.  This is not to say we should have weekly series that show corruption in parts or all over the place, all the time.  Danny Arnold’s remarkable, yet short lived Joe Bash did not make it a whole season.  This was not even because it was a half-hour comedy with no laugh track, and Peter Boyle was great in the title role, but that was just too challenging for the general TV audience with an intelligence expectation in decline.

 

Of course, there was Arnold’s far more funny and successful classic Barney Miller, a great and respected hit.  Bochco has never tried comedy and it is something he ought to try.  Though the cast is too unnaturally young, a criticism that befell Paul Verhoeven’s Science Fiction epic Starship Troopers, both from 1997.  Verhoeven’s film made a point with this, while Brooklyn South seemed to do this for more commercial reasons.  That slight unreality, despite an exceptionally talented and cohesive cast (one of the best in recent memory), may have backfired.  They included Michael DeLuise (the 21 Jump Street alumni), Yancy Butler, Jon Tenney (Oliver Stone’s Nixon), Adam Rodriguez (CSI: Miami), Gary Basaraba, Titus Welliver, Klea Scott, Patrick McGraw, Richard T. Jones and Dylan Walsh.

 

The single season produced 22 episodes meant for hour-long slots, but these are sadly shorter than ever, due to the record-high number of commercial slots with poorer, more degrading, and more insulting than ever advertising.  Between DVD and hard drive TiVo-type digital recorders, you can see why both forms of electronics are experiencing booming sales.  For what is there, the writing is tight and smart.  CBS was just beginning to resurrect itself from “old fuddy duddy” TV hell and this show would have been more likely a hit a few years later, now that the network has their bearings like at no time since the early 1980s (if not with as high a quality of programming).  It did show that CBS was willing to turn the curve back to recovery that they greenlighted the show in the first place.

 

The episodes are as follows:

 

Pilot

Life Under Castro

Why Can’t Even a Couple of Us Get Along?

Touched by a Checkered Cab

Clown Without Pity

A Reverend Runs Through It

Love Hurts

Wild Irish Woes

McMurder One

Dublin or Nothin’

Gay Avec

Exposing Johnson

Tears on My Pillow

Violet Inviolate

Fisticuffs

Don’t You Be My Valentine

Dead Man Sleeping

Fools Russian

Doggonit

Cinnamon Buns

Skel in a Cell

Queens for a Day

 

That is the best set of titles I have seen for any recent TV show in recent memory, outside of animated series and The Sopranos.  That alone gives you an idea of how smart this show was, then watching them is one of commercial TV few true pleasures in recent years.  This is one of the best short-lived TV series in recent memory, especially dealing with the police.  It may be politically right of center, but none of Bochco’s series have been extremely so, which is why they have such consistent and wide respect in the entertainment community.  With that said, the show sets up its situation immediately with a sequence so intense, that it was the first series to earn the MA TV rating.  As is always the case with Bochco, he uses the extra room wisely.

 

Before you know it, a murderous crackhead has gone on a killing spree, a sniper has killed some cops, and the community is in an uproar.  The show did not lack excitement.  Without running into soap opera formulaics, the characters are very well developed and become more interesting as the show moves forward.  With the weekly grind of TV and the fact that this is a show without the freedom of the Horror, Science Fiction, or Fantasy genres, that is not easy.  That is why Brooklyn South deserves to find a new audience the way DVD and Cable recent demonstrated how great and accessible Family Guy really was.  That success revived that show, but for this series, it is sadly too late.

 

The full frame image looks good, with clean, spotless transfers that show the series was nicely photographed considering the usual flat lighting we get in TV.  Again, especially this type of show, which also gets points for finding another camera style separate from that of NYPD Blue.  For being seven years old as of this release, the show holds up well in content as well.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo has healthy Pro Logic surrounds, which also hold up well considering their age.  Mike Post does one of his less showy, less obnoxious scores, which helps this show considerably.  Extras include an exceptional commentary by David Milch, biographies, police radio response codes, and Steven Bochco: The Brooklyn South Interview.  This is a 14+ minutes-long promo piece intended to launch the show during its debut.

 

Those are all a plus to this set.  It is with great sadness that this had to end so soon, as the material here could have gone on for years.  The number one reason to see Brooklyn South is to see one of the few shows of the last twenty years that almost became a watershed success.  If any recent live action show that did not make it deserves a second life, it is this one.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo