On “Picket Fences,” the small-town show that upset the Big Apple’s “NYPD Blue” for last season’s drama-series Emmy, the very decent Brock family was prepared this season to help organize a private school rather than allow 9-year-old Zachary to be bused to Green Bay for desegregation.
On “Chicago Hope,” one of two new medical shows, a patient recently rejected a black surgeon, saying without any guilt that he couldn’t be sure her appointment to the hospital staff wasn’t dictated by affirmative action, rather than merit.
And on “NYPD Blue,” the raw police series that tracks through the seediest side of New York, Detective Andy Sipowicz acknowledged last year that, yeah, he had some problems with blacks, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do his job.
These are examples of a new fact about prime-time drama on TV: Issues of race are no longer always a question of black and white-no longer a certainty in which white liberals support black causes, white rednecks oppose them and hardly anybody resides in between.
For much of television’s history, the issues of race were handled gingerly-or not at all. Only in the 1980s, with such shows as “Hill Street Blues,” “St. Elsewhere” and “L.A. Law,” did the theme arise in any serious vein, and not until “The Cosby Show” was there a dignified black family to admire.
Even then, says Herman Beavers, an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, no television show has ever gotten as serious about black life as “thirtysomething” was about white. And some experts say daytime soap operas over the years have devoted more time to portraying black-white issues than anything at night.
But just the concept of Andy Sipowicz, the tough, determined “NYPD” detective played by Dennis Franz, suggests that prime-time TV has moved into a new era of realism, wading into some delicate subjects that most people still reserve for quiet conversations with close companions.
“You think I’m a racist and you’re rubbing my nose in it,” Sipowicz says to his black lieutenant, Arthur Fancy, in one memorable episode from last season. “I’m entitled to my feelings and my opinion, so long as I do my job the right way.”
Sipowicz is a new kind of television character, going “where no man has gone before,” says J. Fred MacDonald, a professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University and author of several books on television, including “Blacks on White TV.”
In Sipowicz, says David Milch, who created the ABC show along with Steven Bochco, “we wanted to create a character who is unreconstructedly racist. We thought that was typical of a large segment of the New York City Police Department. And we felt that didn’t make him a bad cop. It’s a fact. There’s racism on both sides and to ignore that means you can’t do a show with verisimilitude.”
To Robert Thompson, a communications professor at Syracuse University, television is “emerging into the post-politically correct period,” with “Picket Fences” the most obvious example.
“All in the Family” institutionalized how a range of subjects would be treated on television, he says. “That mode didn’t change for 20 years.
“Now, with `Picket Fences,’ the issues are being readdressed. It’s not the standard type of right-wing backlash to political correctness. It’s not like Rush Limbaugh, for example. But it’s not cut and dried, which says if you present a character of a certain group, a more marginalized group, you know they will be treated as the underdog and good guy.”
Bishetta Merritt, chairwoman of the radio, television and film department at Howard University in Washington, D.C., adds: “In some ways, television is asking the questions that white people in America are asking. It’s reflective of the questions that white Americans have about black people, not the questions the black Americans have.”
Such questions are being raised on television at a time when Gallup Polls are showing widely divergent views among blacks and whites on the extent of racism in the country.
A poll in October 1993, for instance, found that 70 percent of blacks thought new civil rights legislation was necessary to reduce racial discrimination, while only 33 percent of whites held that view.
The same survey found that 70 percent of whites but only 30 percent of blacks believed that job opportunities were the same for both races in their communities. That 40 percentage-point difference was almost twice as large as the difference found in 1963, when 46 percent of whites and 24 percent of blacks said job opportunities were equal.
“The function of entertainment TV is not to make people feel uncomfortable,” says Sut Jhally, a professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst who did extensive studies of “The Cosby Show”-a show, he says, that virtually ignored race. “If you make whites feel guilty, they’ll turn it off-so how do you deal with it without making the whites feel guilty?”
One way, apparently, is to present white qualms about busing or crime or anything else in responsible terms.
CBS’s “Picket Fences” took two episodes to resolve the busing crisis that developed when a black federal judge, Harold Nance, ordered busing between Rome, Wis., the setting for the show, and Green Bay, the big nearby city.
In one scene at a boisterous town meeting where the sentiment is decidedly against busing, Jill Brock, played by Kathy Baker, acknowledges sadly that the townspeople are being driven by “prejudice, let’s be honest.”
But later she tells Nance, played by Paul Winfield: “My Zachary is 9 years old. You will never, never take him away.”
Near the end of the second episode, Nance relents, saying the children of Rome can remain home, but the Green Bay kids are still coming to Rome.
“You made me realize that people out there resisting desegregation are the ones trying to protect their children, their towns,” he says. These people are “caring, respectable, scared.”
The one white character most in support of busing is denied credibility because he has no children.
Michael Pressman, co-executive producer of “Picket Fences,” says the two episodes examined “something that really is long overdue-a subject that supposedly was addressed in the days of Brown v. Board of Education.”
“The tragedy of today is that liberal people of the ’80s obviously are expressing shockingly prejudiced viewpoints. Even our main characters were ashamed of it. That’s what’s going on.
“We are suggesting that life isn’t just all picket fences and rose-garden porches.”
Why at the end, then, did Nance modify his order and bow to the will of the white parents?
“You can have small victories,” Pressman says. “But maybe wanting it all at once is not the most legitimate approach to the subject.”
On “NYPD Blue,” considered by many critics to be the best-written show on television, white cops regularly question and arrest black suspects, and Sipowicz, a recovering alcoholic, never lets his emotions stray too far from his sleeve.
“To do a show about the New York City Police Department without taking a realistic view of the problems of race would have cut us off from an enormous amount of stories,” says Milch. “We addressed going in the question of how candid we would be about racial issues. We discussed that with the network going in, and have had complete cooperation.”
In the episode in which Sipowicz and his lieutenant talk race, a group of blacks has murdered a wealthy white couple. The couple’s daughter had dated a black college student, who has an angry confrontation with Sipowicz when he is brought in for questioning.
“I’m trying to find some (jerks) before they murder another innocent family,” Sipowicz says, every word bathed in angry sarcasm. “It so happens, these particular (jerks) happen to be black. How do you want me to go about this?
“Maybe I should start each question with: `I’m sorry for the injustices the white man has inflicted on your race, but can you provide me with any information?’ “
In the final scene, Fancy, played by James McDaniel, takes Sipowicz to a rib restaurant with an all-black clientele. When Sipowicz acknowledges his discomfort, Fancy points out that blacks, no matter how innocent, feel that same discomfort when interrogated in white-dominated police stations. And for more cause: The waiters aren’t wearing guns and badges.
Milch says the scene was added after the show was shot. “I was troubled that without that scene, the show seemed to be saying that Sipowicz’s racism had no deleterious effect.”
