Producer Dick Wolf is making a big change in “New York Undercover” to get more people to watch.
But one of the stars of the Fox series may be watching more closely than any viewer.
Wolf has repeatedly spoken with pride about having a series where the two leads are people of color–Malik Yoba as African-American police detective J.C. Williams and Michael DeLorenzo as his Puerto Rican partner, Eddie Torres. In fact, Wolf sometimes overstates his case, calling “New York Undercover” “the first minority-lead cop drama,” which overlooks the likes of “Paris,” a 1979-80 police drama starring James Earl Jones.
But for its third season this fall, the series will add a white male detective, played by Jonathan LaPaglia. Wolf says that “I am afraid that the show is not seen as all-embracing. I think that it is perceived as being a minority show.”
DeLorenzo, though, admits some reservations about the change.
“The way (Wolf) put it to me, was that the focus would still be on Eddie and J.C. . . . I can only hope for the best and then continue to, like, monitor the scripts and do my job. And hopefully everything will be copacetic. But if it’s not, I’m out of there.”
DeLorenzo is not resistant to just any change.
“Like any show, this has to evolve,” he says. “Adding another character can create a lot of conflict, and that’s what drama is about–creating conflict. So if it’s utilized correctly, I’m happy with it. If it’s not, I won’t be.”
LaPaglia, the brother of actor Anthony LaPaglia, will play a young police detective from a family of police officers. “His father was killed in Harlem,” Wolf says, “and it’s an open homicide case.”
He considers the new character “an opportunity to expand the storytelling base so that we can add more believable conflict and different points of view to these stories.”
At the same time, he says, the series does not want to turn its back on its core audience, “which is an inner-city and urban audience.”
Wolf said the four returning characters are all minorities–Hispanics Lauren Velez as another detective and DeLorenzo, African-American Yoba and, with Patti D’Arbanville-Quinn as the detectives’ lieutenant, “a white woman in a position of authority.”
Still, DeLorenzo believes the series has already reached out to a larger audience.
“Wherever I go, young Hispanics–young kids, period–come up to me. I was in Puerto Rico and a grandmother came up to me, a white Irish grandmother from Long Island,” DeLorenzo says. “This is our demographic. . . . It’s not only black and Latino households. Those are not the only people who watch our show.”
