Word: copping
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...Very little in Bakersfield P.D. qualifies as real, at least by TV's usual standards. In the pixilated police department where this sitcom is set, the captain is a nervous Nellie who can't make a decision without the approval of his protective aide-de-camp. One sentimental cop causes a ruckus when he takes to bestowing kisses on his partner. A crazed gunman barricades himself inside a building and holds off a SWAT team but seems at a loss to explain why. "I want you to send somebody in," he finally calls out, "to help me think...
Executive producer Larry Levin, a former writer for It's Garry Shandling's Show and creator of last season's cop spoof Arresting Behavior, concedes that even in the best circumstances, Bakersfield P.D. is unlikely to become a Top 10 hit. "I'm asking viewers to look sideways at stuff instead of dead-on, and it throws most people," he says. "My feet are firmly planted in sand. Nothing is black and white...
...candidate to portray a pimp." (The captain, bristling back, says he'll get someone else for the job: "We've got plenty of guys in this precinct who are very much at home around prostitutes.") Rarely has TV portrayed casual racial stereotyping with as much humor or human understanding. Cop-show stereotypes come in for even more satire. The police in this California backwater are a far cry from the cool, macho professionals who have populated TV dramas from Kojak to NYPD Blue. Mostly they are wimpy, neurotic, overemotional misfits, more obsessed with interpersonal trivia than the demands of police...
Does Bakersfield P.D. have a future? The show is probably too gentle and unassertive to inspire the sort of grass-roots campaign that saved or extended shows like Brooklyn Bridge and Cagney & Lacey. Levin thinks the subject matter makes it a tough sell. "Nobody wants to see ineffective cops," he theorizes. "In the days of Car 54, Where Are You? people didn't have to lock their doors or their car. Today there's violence and fear and crime everywhere, and nobody wants to see a cop who can't make a decision." Maybe not, but who says every show...
...novel's major puzzles are why Brennan, the tough old cop on the surveillance team, has gone wrong after a good career; and why Harry Dell'Appa, the smart, cocky young cop, was banished to the Siberia of western Massachusetts. When Dell'Appa finally figures things out, it's clear that Brennan explained himself in the first few sentences he spoke and that Dell'Appa isn't the only smart, ruthless member of his own family. The novel is mannered and the narration moves crabwise, and some readers may bail out. The rest of us may agree that this...