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Seeing red over ABC's shabby treatment of 'NYPD Blue'
Buffalo News - November 7, 1999
By JEF SIMON
What a mess, what an unholy mess. If anyone had driven up on a tricycle three years ago and told you, over lattes and scones, that "NYPD Blue" would be treated as shabbily as it is being
treated by ABC, you'd have thought them daft or under the influence of exotic herbs best left untouched.
By now, the whole sad spectacle has played itself out in newspapers, magazines and infotainment buzzes all over the tube (some of them, at high-tide, even set up a daily "NYPD Blue"
watch, while its Tuesday time slot was on life support). The final compromise, as everyone knows, is that " Once and Again" will keep the Tuesday time slot for now and that "NYPD
Blue" won't start in November (the month of "Greed" and Bryant Gumbel) as originally planned but will return to its comfy Tuesday berth in January.
Whereupon, " Once and Again" will be bumped to Mondays at 10 p.m. after football is over.
As compromises go, that's not bad. The trouble is, it shouldn't have been necessary. It was the result of astonishingly short-sighted honcho thinking at ABC. It violated a cardinal law of network
(not to mention Hindu Karma): never play fast and loose with a truly great TV show.
The gods don't like it.
That's what ABC did when it originally floated the idea of moving "NYPD Blue" to another night to preserve " Once and Again" on Tuesdays.
" Once and Again" is a pretty good TV show. The opportunity to watch Sela Ward once a week is one that we ought to have -- especially in a sensitively written mating and dating soap
about divorced fortysomethings with emotionally needy children.
You know what the network wants -- and what it thinks it already has -- by looking at its primetime promotional spots. To the strains of "Mambo No. 5," we're told about the current smart
relationship-friendly Tuesday night lineup at ABC -- Heather Locklear vamping on "Spin City," the likably droll "Like, You Know," the perenially lovable Dharma and tagalong
stiff Greg, the oft-brilliant and appallingly underseen "Sports Night," topped off with " Once and Again" and its suburban Mom and Dad in heat.
In network executive school, they might teach such a primetime lineup as the thing that any self-respecting network ought to kill for. It's aimed right at the eyes of the most coveted of all TV
demographic prizes: women aged 18 to 49.
Bounce " Once and Again" and replace it with the snarling agonies and street jokes of "NYPD Blue" and you've violated ABC's vision of demographic Utopia and its advertisers.
Add to that the following facts in evidence:
1. " Once and Again" is owned by ABC, which therefore, pockets its success.
2. "NYPD Blue's" David Milch is moving soon to big development deals at a different parent studio and may, therefore, not be able to devote as much oversight time to "NYPD
Blue" as in the past. When a similar situation developed with Bochco and Milch's "Brooklyn South," "NYPD Blue" suffered.
3. Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick -- the proprietors of " Once and Again" -- have been treated cavalierly in past years by ABC on "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called
Life." Some makeups may have been in order.
If you're not thinking things all the way through, it looks like a no-brainer: Keep " Once and Again, " gently place "NYPD Blue" on the nearest well-upholstered ice floe in
what is possibly going to be its valedictory year.
To even further give ABC's clumsiness its due, they were right, I think, to assume that between the two shows -- grizzled vet "NYPD Blue" and seductive, hormonal " Once and
Again" -- the one that was more mobile was "Blue." Put it in any 10 p.m. slot of the week (except opposite juggernaut "ER" on Thursday) and it would still be what the
network geniuses call "an appointment show" (i.e., people will rearrange their week to watch it or tape it).
So much for TV executive pre-primer class. The real world will trump it every time.
What's wrong with all this upper-level fantasyland over at Disney's ABC can be summed up in two words: "Judging Amy."
"Judging Amy" -- or "Providence" in robes, without pooches -- is a hugely popular show that can only get bigger and even more popular. Its domestic courtroom setting is full of
possibilities, everything from harrowing child abuse to marital bloodshed. Its replanting of Tyne Daly in prime time is a bellringer as brilliant as "Providence's" replanting of Mike
Farrell in the middle of "Providence." This is a show that covers the demographic bases.
If this were the stock market, "Judging Amy" would be where the smart money would go -- and stay. If this were the pony track, you'd be wise, as horse-player Jack Klugman so memorably
put it, to "bet your lungs" on "Judging Amy."
"Once and Again," on the other hand, is a thin, little one-note samba. A witty one, to be sure, with very attractive people, but it's static. Its dramatic possibilities -- never large --
are going to become increasingly banal and tiresome as time goes by.
With "Judging Amy" hunkering in on Tuesday nights over at CBS, ABC had to be smoking Abyssinian loco-grass to think they'd get anywhere counter-programming it with " Once and Again.
" The perfect counter-program to "Judging Amy" is, in fact, "NYPD Blue," just as "Judging Amy" is the perfect counter-programming to "NYPD Blue."
At the end of the day, then, what ABC did was to stir up huge vats of bile, ill-will and stomach acid in search of a chimerical Tuesday night demographic juggernaut that wasn't ever going to
happen as long as "Judging Amy" is around.
Everyone -- Sela Ward included -- deserved better. At the end of it all, they look like buffoons, contestants on "Greed" or worse.
Meanwhile, "NYPD Blue" waits patiently in the wings for its regular Tuesday evening appointment with our deeper selves.
Copyright © 1999 Buffalo News. All rights reserved.
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