Early last month, officer Andy Sipowicz donned his best dress uniform to leave for the official ceremony marking his promotion to sergeant.
Typically, things were pretty hectic and disorganized at the 15th Precinct, where Sipowicz has been on fictive duty for the past 12 years of “NYPD Blue,” airing its final episode (and retrospective) starting at 8 p.m. Tuesday on WLS-Ch. 7.
Nobody seemed to find time to make much of Sipowicz’s moment. A somewhat disgruntled, vaguely crestfallen, but typically monosyllabic and emotionally inscrutable Sipowicz put on his hat and prepared to walk out the door.
Within seconds, as he stood on the stairway, the expression on actor Dennis Franz’s face said it all. There below, arranged in strict, stiff formality, were all of Sipowicz’s colleagues, the men and women he worked and fought with all of the past 12 years gathered for a surprise tribute. There below, as well, life imitating art, were the actors who shared the soundstage with Franz for some or all of the same dozen years.
In the scene, Franz conveyed as little emotion as possible, just enough to let us know, as he walked misty-eyed through the applauding line, how much it all meant.
It is the oldest, cheapest trick in the Hollywood hanky handbook. Except nothing about it was cheap. It was as genuinely touching and understated as any moment on television all season, an example of the crafty mix of hard knocks and gentle insight that made the show so successful — and so valuable.
You didn’t even need to know all that Sipowicz had been through: three marriages, alcoholism, constant friction with so many colleagues. The creative staff hasn’t bothered in weeks to turn to the casual, sometimes all-too-ugly nudity that won such notoriety and helped the show’s earnest mission to be real, gritty and true-to-life.
Instead, the past five weeks or so, leading up to Tuesday’s top-secret farewell, has been an intermittent replay of the nuances of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” which set the standard when it comes to painful, bittersweet goodbyes. “NYPD Blue” stood apart (by no means the only example or the first) by exploring such feelings among characters cast in emotional concrete. Policemen, and Sipowicz typified this, are not touchy-feely, sentimental softies. They can’t afford to be. We rely on their very toughness.
That enabled producer Steven Bochco and the other talents involved to offer up powerfully subtle, resonating sentimentalism. For all the action and detective plotting, “NYPD Blue” is that rare genre, the macho weeper, a seductive contradiction that, when it works, serenades something quite deep. Even the hardest, most jaded, toughest men and women among us are all too human.
Ultimately, the 15th Precinct proved another exploration of the extended workplace family, another sample in the long TV tradition including “ER,” “St. Elsewhere” and even “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Last week, Sipowicz, in a typically awkward, muddled effort to communicate, reluctantly asked his superior to let him take over the precinct command. This only after the precinct’s gay clerical worker (Bill Brochtrup), a man Sipowicz once disdained, said he was leaving, too, after so many unpleasant departures, including Sipowicz himself to sergeant duty, detective Greg Medavoy (Gordon Clapp) to retirement and precinct head honcho Thomas Bale (Currie Graham) after being shot on duty.
Not ambition, but surrogate workplace fatherhood fuels Sipowicz’s career move. Tuesday — in an episode not made available for preview — we’ll maybe learn how well he succeeds. Whatever the answer, the series, in its final days, has hammered home its ultimate message.
It’s not about dirty words, bare behinds, police politics or criminal duplicity. It’s about fighting for your family and knowing, believing, even amid cruelty and violence, that decency, loyalty and love are always options.
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E-mail: sismith@tribune.com.
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PARTNERS
Name Andy Sipowicz’s detective partners and matrimonial matches through 12 seasons of “NYPD Blue.”
(See photos).
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‘NYPD Blue’ set standards for TV drama
With Tuesday’s final episode of “NYPD Blue,” one-time Chicago stage actor Dennis Franz joins an elite group, portraying the same character, police officer Andy Sipowicz, in an ongoing network drama for 12 consecutive seasons.
We spoke with him by phone late last week about his thoughts on it all, and an edited version of the conversation follows:
Q. The dozen seasons of “NYPD Blue” took you in real life from age 48 to 60. So you’ve gone from struggling middle-age actor to grand old man in a single TV series?
A. That’s a fair assumption. At 48, I was still just looking for jobs. I hoped for a successful, long-running show, but I never dreamed I’d stumble into something that would take me through my 50s. Believe me, it’s not what a kid from the suburbs of Chicago would ever expect.
Q. How did you become an actor?
A. I grew up in Maywood. I was in high school at Proviso East, and until my junior year, I was more interested in sports, baseball, football and swimming. But I was going with a girl who was auditioning for ‘The Crucible,’ and I went with her and saw that all the guys trying out were meek and quiet. I felt,
I can do better.’ I asked to join the auditions, I spoke the lines really loudly and I got cast. I got a degree from Southern Illinois University, and after the Army and Vietnam, I was doing dinner theater in Mt. Prospect when Stuart Gordon of the Organic Theater Company came to see some friends in our cast. He asked me to audition and cast me in `Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,’ which was a huge success.
Q. How do you remember your Chicago days, which famously included the original “Bleacher Bums”?
A. They were a big changing point in my life, of course. And Stuart, Joe Mantegna and Mesach Taylor all became lifelong friends. I first played a cop at the Organic, in fact, in `Cops,’ which began as a collaboration between David Mamet and Terry Curtis Fox. You could say that role was the roots of what became Andy Sipowicz.
Q. Sgt. Sipowicz is actually the 28th police officer you’ve played. How do you get along with real cops?
A. I’ve met hundreds, if not thousands, and they’re always supportive. We were vacationing in Amalfi and were driving in the country for the day, and when we got back to town, they’d cordoned off the whole area, due to some political function. But the Italian policeman, armed with a machine gun, took a look at me and said, `Hey, New York police. Come on through.’
Q. Why hasn’t there been more of Andy’s personal life this season?
A. Charlotte Ross [who’d been playing Andy’s wife] had a baby in real life and decided not to return. Steven Bochco and I had dinner, and we agreed we wouldn’t kill her off; we didn’t want that tragedy.
I agreed with the decision, but it chopped me off at the knees. It was an extreme disappointment. A huge part of the portrayal is the balancing act between his private and professional life, and this made it more one-sided.
Q. The show began with notoriety due to the adult language and nudity. How have you reacted to the new wave of censorship?
A. I think `NYPD Blue’ did set new standards for TV drama, for better or worse. We did open things up. Since the Janet Jackson thing, television has taken a few steps back. But my belief is it’s temporary. `Desperate Housewives’ is a network TV show in which a married woman has explicit love scenes with a teenager. Nobody says anything because that’s a major hit.
Q. Why does it matter to an artist?
A. I’m not sure it does. But Bochco wanted to use those tools to go places network TV hadn’t before. It doesn’t make sense for mobsters or tough policemen to say things like `darn’ or another substitution when they never would in real life. As for the nudity, it could be titillating to a degree, but I did a shower scene that was comical.
Q. How was it shooting the last show?
A. A combination of all the emotions but anger. Joy, sadness, melancholy, jubilation, love and great relief. Every time we finished a scene that was the last for any cast member, we completely broke down and applauded and hugged and blubbered like babies.
Q. Any hints about Tuesday’s finale?
A. This is not an ending where there’s a huge tragedy, or we lose any characters. It’s upbeat, not downbeat. It gives a sense of closure to the stories we’ve told in 12 years, the end of an era, but also the beginning of a new one.
Q. A little like life right now for Dennis Franz. Your plans? Any chance you’ll return to do theater here?
A. I’d love that. Being on stage holds the hearts of many actors, myself included. I’m also hoping for a couple of movies, and I wouldn’t mind a comedy.
Q. What percentage of Andy Sipowicz is really Dennis Franz?
A. I’d feel successful if it was really 0 to 100 in favor of Sipowicz.
The art of a true actor is to completely disappear and have this other human come out. Most of the time, it’s impossible. Few actors achieve it at all, but that’s the ultimate goal. With Sipowicz, I’d say half and half. It’s 50-50.
— Sid Smith
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Sipowicz’s partners — on the job and at home
The “NYPD Blue” character created by actor Dennis Franz has been a gruff, testy, constant through the show’s 12 seasons. During that time, Detective Andy Sipowicz has been paired professionally with four police detectives and matrimonially matched with three women.
(See photos).
