When you get past all the hype, beyond all the vocal debate about whether it is too violent and raunchy for prime-time television, what you are left with in “NYPD Blue” are the stories, David Milch says.
Forget the shots of detective John Kelly’s bare buns, or the sewer mouth of his tormented partner Andy Sipowicz, portrayed by Chicagoan cop-playing veteran Dennis Franz.
Those are just details, part of the scenery, designed to enhance the credibility of the whacked-out yet everyday world of New York’s streets that Steven Bochco and Milch, the show’s co-executive producer and head writer, have created in the television hit of the fall network season.
That these flourishes were heavily advertised and became wildly controversial did not hurt the success of the show, to be sure. And more titillation is coming Tuesday night in the form of an episode set partly in a topless bar, coincidence of coincidences, during the fall network sweeps period.
But none of that would matter, and the network would not have put the show on the air after 15 months of negotiations, and the show would not be the hottest series on television, if the stories were no good.
“We’re trying to tell realistic stories…. It is not only these stories that involve graphic language and sexual situations, but a whole range of realistic stories, which includes those (elements),” Milch says in an interview in his roomy corner office in the Bochco Building on the Twentieth Century Fox lot in Century City.
“(This is a show) with stories involving racism and other situations which have not been dealt with in the way that we deal with them . . . What we want to do is create a world and people it with credible characters and tell their stories.”
Always, it is the stories. That was what a kind if unlikely mentor, the late novelist Robert Penn Warren, taught Milch when he was a college kid at Yale with aspirations to become a writer.
Write good stories, true stories, or at least stories that would be true for the characters you create, Warren told his student. Don’t write the stories to turn out the way you wish they would, or the way you need them to in order to bury old demons or identify with the characters.
More than two decades later, Milch, 48, still is laboring to get it right, with the personal demons as well as with the stories. Vindicated by the ratings so far, he is weary of the debate waged by the Rev. Donald Wildmon and other conservative critics who have made the show a cause celebre in the national controversy over television violence.
But unlike the “A-Team” and other popular shows of the last few years that have featured endless gunplay with no one appearing to be hurt, or shows that kill off a bad guy or stage a car chase as a way for writers to wrap up plot lines in neat, clean resolutions, “NYPD Blue” is messy, and the big things rarely are resolved. When guns are used, people get hurt, and characters’ actions have consequences, sometimes lasting ones. Just like real life, Milch says.
“I feel the purpose of this show is not moral, but I feel this is a very moral show,” he says. “. . . There are shows on television that are empty and vacuous and vapid, and in that sense, from my point of view, they are corrupt. This show isn’t like that. I’m not interested in stories that don’t have a moral resonance to them, not for morality’s own sake, but because it’s part of being human.”
In the same vein, Milch could not care less if the show’s critics might be ready to pounce on the embarassing difficulties from his own past: his former heroin addiction, alcoholism, years of compulsive gambling and otherwise self-destructive behavior.
It all was part of the story, the dark part, for Milch, a former Yale University English lecturer and failed novelist before he became a television big shot and devoted father of three, a man who finished first in his class at Yale but admits he didn’t know anything.
A big, beefy guy’s guy who is equally at ease talking about mobsters he has known and competing theories of literary criticism, Milch enjoys the satisfaction that derives from being associated with another winner a decade after collaborating with Bochco on “Hill Street Blues,” the 1980s cop soap of choice.
But Milch knows the joy ride will last only as long as the stories do. Luckily for Milch, a son of a Buffalo, N.Y., surgeon whose father first took him to the racetrack at the age of 5, his own life provides a good source of tales from which to work.
There were the many cousins in the New York rackets, the losers and low-lifes he has befriended, the scrapes with the law and the unpublished novels. Then there were the ups and down of TV, the successes such as “Hill Street,” which earned him an Emmy and a $25,000 Humanitas Prize a decade ago, and failures such as “Beverly Hills Buntz” and “Capitol News,” two short-lived sitcoms in the late 1980s.
There are the stories he would like to forget, such as the time in college when, in a stoned stupor, he fired a shotgun at a police car, resulting in his expulsion from Yale Law School.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt anybody,” Milch says. “Under whatever drugs I was taking the distinction between animate and inanimate objects (was not clear) …. However, that was not a distinction they were very interested in.”
Milch is decidedly uncomfortable talking about “the stupidities” of those days and his admitted addictions to drugs, alcohol and tobacco, all of which he says he has conquered. But there is no getting around them, either. “I have tried to live past it,” he says.
Milch insists gambling no longer is “part of the rhythm and texture of his life,” but his racehorses remain a passion. Last year a colt named Gilded Time won a Breeder’s Cup race. And when they run, sometimes he bets and he bets big. He still gets comped in Vegas, too, he says, though he seldom goes there anymore. “It’s not something I can afford,” he says. “I mean, I can afford it financially, but not any other way.”
But if Milch has tried to move beyond all that, he remembers where he left it and takes it out to look at from time to time. All of it, good times and bad, helps fuel the creativity that helps craft the stories that America is tuning into each Tuesday night.
In fact, if it were up to Milch, “NYPD Blue” would be a different show, starring a rogue cop decidedly more morally ambiguous than Kelly, an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the mob who must do bad things in order to keep up his identity.
Bochco talked him out of it, and Milch is grateful. “Steven’s feeling was, I think in retrospect, correctly, that this was not a character an audience would come back to each week,” Milch says. “(This) was not an atypical process. I sort of have the original idea and it’s way too dark, and Steven civilizes it.”
The two began their collaboration more than a decade ago, when Jeffrey Lewis, a former Yale roommate of Milch working as a writer and producer on “Hill Street Blues,” brought him to Bochco’s attention.
Now, minus some of the stock characters and comic exaggerations that marked “Hill Street,” a police precinct in an unnamed city that resembled Chicago, Milch and Bochco have come back with a faster, harder-edged show set in New York, one of the world’s great laboratories of human behavior.
“Police work is complicated, but New York police work is the most complicated, because you constantly are in a triage situation,” says Milch. “All you have to do is look around you on virtually any street in New York and people are breaking the law. And so you have to figure out, the cop has to assign priorities constantly, what he’s going to pay attention to and what he isn’t going to pay attention to.”
Milch and Bochco gets lots of their stories from New York cops, and so far, police by and large like the show, Milch says. He laughs when someone mentions one incongruous detail in a show so devoted to realism: the distinctly Chicago accent and bearing of Franz’s character Sipowicz.
“Is there an immigration law that people from Chicago can’t move to New York?” Milch asks. His wife, Rita Stern, an Emmy-award winning documentary maker, is a Chicagoan, and Milch finds the Second City’s “aggressive parochialism” an “endearing quality.”
There are stories for everything, Milch says, and coming episodes will have a story to cover Sipowicz, too, providing him with a Croatian background and Chicago roots.
More than 40 ABC affiliates across the country still refuse to air “NYPD Blue,” but in some cities such as Dallas where independents have picked it up, their ratings are leading their time slots. Bochco points out that more people are watching the show each week, tuning in to keep up with the stories.
The success has brought film offers pouring in to Milch the last two months; he’s too busy, though, to do much about it for now. And now he and Bochco have another new show in mind, this time about Los Angeles cops.
“It takes a very different approach,” says Milch. “The whole atmosphere is different. The feel in the show is different.”
He is reluctant to discuss details, but the stories, he says, they are taking shape already.
