In talking about his heady new series “Murder One,” executive producer Steven Bochco was asked why he thought the radical concept could work, considering that the public seemed to tire quickly of the last TV drama that set out to follow one murder case through a whole season, “Twin Peaks.”
“People did not get bored with one story,” Bochco fired back. “People got bored with no story. We have a story.”
Indeed, they do. It begins with the slaying of a 15-year-old girl in Los Angeles, found “naked, tied up, strangled, drugs all over the place,” as one lawyer puts it.
So far, that’s not far from “Twin Peaks.” But instead of using the seemingly normal denizens of a small town as accessories to the murder, Bochco has conceived this series so that it will take place on America’s highest social plane, among people whose renown would help sell tabloid newspapers.
The victim lived in a building that’s owned by Richard Cross, a club- and bed-hopping millionaire philanthropist played by Stanley Tucci with a menacing naivete. Her sister and roommate, an ennui-stricken model, is one of Cross’ girlfriends. And one of the men who was willing to take advantage of her youth and confusion, we learn in the first episode (9 p.m. Tuesday, ABC-Ch. 7), is actor Neil Avedon (Jason Gedrick), who seems modeled on Johnny Depp’s blend of volatility and greasy charm.
Instead of trying to run on the fumes of style and attitude, a la “Twin Peaks,” “Murder One,” at least in its premiere, has high octane in its tank. Boasting a tough, savvy script and the cast to handle it, the episode moves at a relentless pace from the discovery of the murder to Cross being charged with it. Along the way it establishes–or at least whets the viewer’s appetite for more of–an intriguing assemblage of themes and characters.
Tabloid-ready milieu or no, it’s clear that as the murder unfolds itself, the real story of “Murder One” will be the criminal-justice system, told in the most painstaking detail any channel this side of Court TV has offered.
It’s about feuds between cops and lawyers, lies between clients and lawyers, battles for alpha attorney status between lawyers and lawyers. It’s about the warping, blast-furnace heat the media bring to a criminal case that combines sex, death and celebrity. It’s about the spinning, kicking bull we rely on to punish the guilty and the cowboys who try to ride it, whether motivated by money, fame, duty or machismo.
A master of that system, and the centerpiece of the series, is superstar defense attorney Theodore Hoffman. We meet Hoffman when he’s defending the punk actor on yet another disturbing-the-peace charge. The sniggering actor calls his lawyer “my Doberman.”
But Hoffman is more than a mere attack dog for justice. He’s also a realist. When Cross first comes to visit, worried because the police want to talk to him about the murder, Hoffman drops everything, including a patiently waiting lesser client, to help him. This is, after all, a very wealthy man.
Atypical leading man
Daniel Benzali, who guested as a mob lawyer on Bochco’s other current series, “NYPD Blue,” plays Teddy Hoffman, and he is, against all notions of screen stardom, riveting. Tall, bald and paunchy, eyes set too close together to be handsome, he’s like an elongated Buddha or, as his nickname would suggest, an exotic species of teddy bear. But in his savage willfulness and keen street smarts, he puts you more in mind of a grizzly.
Benzali plays him as a man who is, except in quiet moments at home, always defending his client. Holding his spine ramrod straight and speaking in a low, mesmerizing rumble, he captures that sense of lawyer-as-actor that Americans have become so familiar with in real life.
As “Chicago Hope” can attest, ABC is taking a huge risk by scheduling the series head-to-head on Thursday night against NBC’s juggernaut, “ER.” But the network is hedging by airing the first three episodes on Tuesdays, in the “NYPD Blue” slot following popular sitcoms. The hope is that by the time it moves over to 9 p.m. Thursdays, in mid-October, the hook will have been set. (“NYPD Blue,” meanwhile, doesn’t start with new episodes until later that month.)
When the “ER”-“Murder One” battle begins in earnest, Bochco will, in a sense, be battling his own shadow. With his “Hill Street Blues” and “L.A. Law,” he conditioned viewers to expect good drama on NBC at 9 p.m. Thursdays.
But this is why science and mass marketing have brought us the $150 VCR.
This series is not a sure thing. ABC’s scheduling strategy means “ER” will have time to re-establish its powerful hold on the public.
A boys-club feel to the first episode may keep women viewers, especially, alienated. Hoffman’s wife, at least at the outset, comes across as an idealized, soft-focus homebody. And a colleague seems a purely male vision of the ambitious young female attorney; when she boasts blithely at a meeting that, to get a client’s mind off of his anger at being kept waiting, “I practiced my posture for him,” credibility is as strained as her sweater.
Balancing act
And Bochco recognizes that he has to offer easy entry points both for viewers who don’t have the dedication to watch every episode of a series and for those who are conditioned by decades of TV court cases to expect a neat bow around them within, at most, two episodes. “Murder One” is, after all, a show about a murder case that won’t go to trial until about halfway through the 23-episode season.
But he and his co-producers’ solutions to these problems seem ingenious. The show will summarize itself each week via news reports on an equivalent of Court TV, and some of the episodes will offer insight into the lawyers at Hoffman’s firm by giving them other cases that do get resolved.
“Murder One” could be portrayed as a cheap attempt to cash in on the O.J. Simpson case. But Bochco insists that the idea’s roots reach back to his frustration with the rapid-fire legal process on “L.A. Law.”
It can only help though, that since then, through plodding, high-profile cases like the Menendez and Simpson murders, the nation has grown accustomed to a realistic version of law and its sometimes unreal pace.
And, let’s face it, if somebody had offered us, in the coverage of Simpson, more of Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro and F. Lee Bailey bumping chests in the evening, and less of witnesses prattling on about DNA helixes and industry-standard glove stitching patterns, we would have jumped at the chance.
“Murder One” looks to be that chance.
– Tony redux: Tony Danza’s new visit to network TV is on ABC’s “Hudson Street,” premiering Tuesday (7:30 p.m., WLS-Ch. 7).
He is, it won’t surprise you to learn, playing the same guy he always plays, the same self-loving way. This time he’s a New Jersey detective sharing custody (amiably, a nice touch) of his 10-year-old son with his ex-wife.
Lori Loughlin (from “Full House”) verges on vanilla as the Ivy League liberal reporter who goes on a blind date with him, then lands a job as a police reporter. Sexual tension to follow.
The premiere, directed by James Burrows, has a few chuckles, brisk pacing and the overall gloss of competence. But there’s no compelling reason to tune in.
– Chasing rainbows: “Pursuit of Happiness,” NBC’s new comedy making its debut Tuesday (8:30 p.m., WMAQ-Ch. 5), goes straight into the “what were they thinking?” file.
Here’s the first episode: Bad things happen in the life of a bland Chicago lawyer.
Tom Amandes, familiar from Chicago theaters, plays the lawyer. His Steve Rutledge is the kind of guy you’d rather have coaching your kid’s soccer team than appearing on your TV set.
Slack and predictable, verging on unwatchable, this came from producers of “Frasier,” but not in my most charitable moments can I imagine the meeting where someone with authority at NBC said, “This has to be on TV.”
