Mr. Cop Show

And, of course, it's no real police sting. The cops are being played by actors Benjamin Bratt and Jerry Orbach. But when it plays as a segment of Law & Order on television a month later, it will look very much like the real thing.

Same day, a few hours later. Across town in a large warehouse, a police precinct buzzes with activity as a neo-Farrakhan group, infiltrated by a police detective, is confronted by an unblinkingly professional station lieutenant. Again, not reality, but close. The lieutenant is played by Patti D'Arbanville-Quinn, and her detectives, played by Malik Yoba and Michael DeLorenzo, are hanging close by. And in a few weeks, this too will air as a scene on the flashy New York Undercover.

By the next day, yet another cop show, this one a brand-new series called Swift Justice, will be filming more mundane scenes throughout Manhattan, where characters merely get in cars and drive off in a big hurry. These three shows have something in common: executive producer -- and creator -- Dick Wolf. These days, it's hard to swing a dead cat around Manhattan without whacking one of Wolf's on-location productions, which have taken the way audiences look at cop shows to a new, creative level.

Before there was a Homicide: Life on the Streets or NYPD Blue, there was Law & Order, which -- when Murder, She Wrote ends its season this year -- will become television's longest current-running drama. With Wolf's programs in the vanguard, a new kind of cop show rules the TV airwaves today. Blood, pyrotechnics, and sleek cars are out. Intricate storytelling and fully realized characters, elements that had become almost passé, are in.

"When I was growing up," says Wolf from his car phone, "there were cop shows like The Defenders and Naked City. And the great thing about them was how real they were. [Naked City] was set in New York; they shot all over the city, and there was no higher reality content in a cop show until Hill Street Blues. Law & Order is a direct descendent of those shows, and it's the most ambitious show I've worked on. But beyond that, it has been a instrument for telling stories in a totally different way than I've ever been able to tell them before."

The premise of Law & Order -- first half-hour the cops chase down the villain, second half-hour the District Attorney's office prosecutes -- may sound contrived and even restricting. But Wolf's initial premise, in which he set out to mix documentary-style filming with a constant stream of dialogue to tell complex, real-life legal-obsessive stories, meant pushing the envelope of what was accepted on television. The personal lives of the characters were almost non-existent; traditional camera angles and established shots were gone, and the story was always told from the point of view of the principal four characters: two cops, two lawyers. What seemed obvious in the initial five minutes of the show was never quite so by the final five. The show's premise was, in the end, strong enough to stand a revolving door of cast members: George Dzundza, Paul Sorvino, Michael Moriarty, Dann Florek, Richard Brooks, and Chris Noth over six seasons.

Jerry Orbach, who portrays Detective Lennie Briscoe, was brought in during the show's third season to replace Sorvino, and in his trailer outside the surveillance van he says the changes may have had as much to do with the show's success as the writing.

"If the same four or six people who were there originally were still there now, it'd be off the air. All of those changes have kept up the interest."

Upheavals or no, Law & Order has worked, helping other shows open new doors. Communications professor Jan Roberts-Breslin of Emerson College points out that these days, television is venturing where once movies dominated.

"Right now, there's an acceptance of these more serious, content-driven character-dramas on television that we don't see in the movies. Any movies dealing with cops are huge, large-scale, special-effects action movies. Television has become, at least for right now, the place for the more thoughtful, character-driven shows, which is a reversal of the overall prejudice against television -- that movies are more thoughtful. That's a hard case to make right now."

Wolf, however, is leery of taking credit for ushering in some kind of cop new age, saying he lets the writers do the grunt work. "This cult of personality that has grown up around producers isn't right," he says. "A producer is like the CEO of a company and should, if anything, be congratulated at being perspicacious in his hiring practices. What I try to do is make my job as unimportant as possible by hiring people who can really run things without any interference."

No stranger to cop shows, Wolf wrote for such seminal police dramas as Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice before striking out on his own. In a way, the serious, bleak atmosphere of Hill Street can be seen in Law & Order, while the flashy, more ethnic, MTV audience-geared New York Undercover could be a half-brother to Miami Vice.

"This is a different kind of Dick Wolf show, because we're more character-driven," says Michael DeLorenzo, who plays Detective Eddie Torres on New York Undercover. "And this is not your everyday ordinary cop show, either. You have a Puerto Rican and an African-American co-starring in a one-hour drama -- something that's never really been done before -- taking you into their work lives and their home lives, and how the job affects them at home."

"New York Undercover is entertainment," says Wolf. "The entire aim with Law & Order was to give a very documentary look inside the legal system. The only thing that connects those two shows and Swift Justice is that in one version or another they came out of my head. Some are just pure entertainment and some are much more serious programs."

Law & Order may be a modern take on the obscure 1960s drama Arrest and Trial, and New York Undercover may be a hipper, newer Miami Vice, but whether Wolf agrees or not, he is being perceived as a unique creative force in the industry. The Museum of Television and Radio held seminars in February, two dedicated to Wolf's work, focusing on the one character his shows share -- New York City.

Curator David Bushman says: "Dick Wolf's shows present these two images of the city. New York Undercover has the infusion of the hip-hop subculture and Law & Order is more traditional, more establishment, but revolutionary in it's own way. Producers who grew up with television look for ways to tweak the conventions, stylistically and narratively. And among contemporary producers, no one has done more for that than Dick Wolf."

And the buzzword for today's cop dramas -- whether entertainment, drama, or an amalgam -- is "reality." The audience enters a hard-bitten, cynical world when it chooses to watch a police show, and these days, reality doesn't mean seeing every exit wound or blood-spattered wall; it means addressing the consequences of violence and crime, without rubbing the nose of the viewer in the details. At least one non-Wolf show, Homicide: Life on the Streets, has taken Wolf's revolutionary style changes and pushed even harder for a new perspective. Homicide even merged with Law & Order for one two-part episode this year. Ratings for both programs were higher than either show individually had ever gotten.

Richard Belzer, who portrays Lieutenant John Munch on Homicide, says he thinks today's cop shows will age better even than their predecessors. "These shows are so authentic in their period, and other shows like this were so obviously fictionalized before, and we're striving for a realism that hasn't been used," says Belzer over the phone from Los Angeles. "I think it'll be closer to looking back at a documentary than the other cop shows from years ago will be. Not to slam them -- they were good in their time -- but now they look a little creaky. We've created a new hybrid."

"There are a lot of moral gray areas out there," says professor Roberts-Breslin, "and shows like Law & Order acknowledge that they exist. The difference with shows now is this moral ambiguity -- that there are less distinct lines between the good guys and the bad guys, between the crime and the punishment. And after events like the O.J. trial, there's a more general understanding on the part of the public that things don't always follow through the way they're supposed to."

Says Belzer, "Our show isn't all that neat. The good guys don't always win." Which, these days, is a more valuable aspect of cop drama than how many car chases and expensive explosions can be racked up in an hour. By reaching beyond hackneyed, clichéd story-lines and giving characters realistic depth, shows like Law & Order, New York Undercover, and Homicide ask for millions of viewers to comprehend a complex, detailed, unsentimental version of the American legal system on a weekly basis. To be able to create a new vision is one thing. To have it achieve high ratings, as all of these shows are, gradually, is another. Producers such as Dick Wolf have proven it can be done. And as their maverick shows slowly become the norm, they have also proven one other thing -- that there are many different ways for the good guys to win.