Word: cops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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REPETITION IS HONORED AS A necessary principle in the music of Bach, the spin of prayer wheels and the effective swinging of a baseball bat over the long season and into the play-offs, but not in the matter of cop-and-crime stories. This is unfair. "You're reading another one of his?" the addict's spouse derides, leaving unspoken the remainder of the gibe ("rather than learning Italian or visiting the aged...
Finnegan's Week by Joseph Wambaugh (Morrow; 348 pages) is a caper story of a kind, if getting through the workweek without sinking into occupational depression, or into yet another doomed marriage, can be called a caper. Finbar Finnegan is a San Diego cop with three ex-wives and a receding hairline, but only in real life. He hates his job and wants to be an actor, and as this cheerfully silly tale commences, he is mugging into the bathroom mirror, preparing to audition for the part of a contract killer on a TV cop 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...
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...
...ambition, hubris and nostalgia still inspire many of the most talented American filmmakers to try the form. Steven Bochco, after creating the hit series L.A. Law but before creating the hit series NYPD Blue, created the very expensive flop series Cop Rock, a weekly musical about police. "It was the most fun I've ever had in television," says Bochco, whose father was a Broadway pit musician. The audience regarded Cop Rock as a curious taste not worth acquiring -- "I think people sitting at home alone," Bochco figures now, "were embarrassed" -- and ABC canceled it quickly. James Brooks, the director...