Word: cops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Saturday: Cop Shoot Cop and guest Slaughter Shack, Batmantic and Twisted Roots...
Pity the poor TV innovator; his work is never done. Steven Bochco changed the course of network TV in the early '80s with his breakthrough cop show Hill Street Blues. He opened new areas of provocative subject matter a few years later with his yuppie drama L.A. Law. Those hits were enough to convince ABC that Bochco was worth a long-term gamble: in 1987 the network signed him to a contract worth $50 million, to develop 10 series during the next decade. Then Bochco had to face a really tricky problem: how to top himself...
...first show under the new ABC deal, Doogie Howser, M.D., Bochco tried a gimmick: a comedy about a 16-year-old genius with a medical degree. Then he turned experimental, adding musical numbers to a police drama and coming up with Cop Rock. The show failed with audiences, probably because Bochco did part of his job too well: the gritty cop scenes were so compelling that the musical numbers (which rarely measured up) seemed like rude interruptions...
...Bochco has retrenched. Civil Wars, his latest drama series, takes him back into comfortable L.A. Law territory. Mariel Hemingway and Peter Onorati (a survivor of Cop Rock) play New York City lawyers who team up to handle divorce work. The Bochco trademarks are all here: three or four story lines interwoven through the hour, a mix of social comment and sophomoric black humor, and a slick, upscale look. (Even the office secretary dresses like a Vogue model...
...Asia. "I remember walking and walking," recalls Little Devil, 16, describing his family's trek out of Cambodia when he was five. "If we didn't keep up, we'd be lost." Perhaps because of their past globe trotting, Cambodian gang members can be astonishingly mobile. When Long Beach cops saturated the "Anaheim corridor" this summer after a burst of shoot-outs, the Cambodian gangs vanished. "They took off for Stockton and Modesto -- maybe farther," says Mike Nen, an ethnic-Cambodian cop. Adds gang detective Sorenson: "The Hispanics sit on the corner and stare at you. The Asians might...