The Master Was a Mensch

I knew what Steven Bochco could accomplish, long before I knew who Steven Bochco was. The New York City-born screenwriter-producer—who died from leukemia on Sunday at age 74—was behind many of the television presentations I watched during the 1970s and ’80s, my formative years as a boob-tube viewer.

According to his extensive list of credits on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Bochco helped create The New Doctors, one of the rotating segments of NBC’s The Bold Ones, and then scripted 45 episodes of that influential series. He developed stories for the science-fiction drama The Invisible Man, the underappreciated cop show Delvecchio, the NBC Mystery Movie cornerstones Columbo and McMillan & Wife, the Rockford Files spinoff Richie Brockelman, Private Eye, and Lorne Greene’s ill-fated Griff. He also wrote one of the Robert Stack episodes I remember best from The Name of the Game: 1970’s “So Long, Baby, and Amen,” starring Sal Mineo.

Bochco went on to still greater fame creating (or co-creating) shows that ranged from James Earl Jones’ Paris and John Ritter’s Hooperman to landmark dramas such as Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and the initially controversial police procedural NYPD Blue. He also gave us the medical comedy-drama Doogie Howser, M.D. Although Bochco was a 10-time Primetime Emmy Award winner, he didn’t always have a magical touch; some of his creations died an early—if not always justified—death, such as Murder One, Brooklyn South, Philly, and the odd musical police drama Cop Rock. In more recent years, Bochco’s influence lessened significantly, though he continued to turn out high-quality programs such as Raising the Bar and Murder in the First (the latter a reworking of Murder One). Amid all of this, in 2003 he somehow found time enough to pen a crime novel titled Death by Hollywood, which Kirkus Reviews called “a vulgar, sex-filled romp—in the best sense: good, nasty fun.”

The Web is filled today with tributes to Bochco, but what they say is fairly well summed up in TV writer Ken Levine’s new post:

Television has lost a GIANT. There’s just no way to overstate the impact Steven Bochco had on the medium. All the David Chase’s and Matthew Weiner’s and Vince Gilligan’s and other masterful storytellers who created series that elevated the TV drama to an art owe a huge debt to Steven Bochco. And I bet each and every one would be the first to agree.
Hill Street Blues was revolutionary. Viewers had never seen a TV drama that complex, that gripping, that real. To be honest, most viewers didn’t know what to make of it at the start. It took the unflagging support of Grant Tinker, who presided over NBC, to keep the show on the air despite it’s paltry initial ratings. … More groundbreaking shows like NYPD Blue and L.A. Law followed. Bochco also discovered and nurtured some pretty astounding writers like David Milch and David E. Kelley. Bochco pushed envelopes, he challenged networks, and he challenged audiences.

And all the while, he was a mensch.

That’s an important key. Without naming names, there are a number of these brilliant show creators that followed who were horrible to work for. They’d pummel their writers, take all the credit they could, and create a toxic atmosphere. Not Steven Bochco. He supported writers, protected writers, and allowed them to blossom.

READ MORE: “Steven Bochco, Producer of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, Dies at 74,” by Matthew Haag and Christopher Mele (The New York Times); “Steven Bochco, Innovative Co-Creator of NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Dies at 74,” by Brian Lowry (Variety); “Steven Bochco, Creative Force Behind Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and NYPD Blue, Dies at 74,” by Mike Barnes (The Hollywood Reporter); “Iconic Producer Steven Bochco Has Died at 74. These 5 Shows Explain How He Changed TV,” by Todd VanDerWerff (Vox); “R.I.P., Steven Bochco, Who Willed Broadcast TV Into Adulthood,” by Ed Bark (TV Worth Watching); “Godspeed Steven Bochco,” by Terence Towles Canote (A Shroud of Thoughts); “A Word on Steven Bochco, Columbo Contributor Par Excellence” (The Columbophile).

Bullet Points: First 2016 Edition — Finally!

This has been an extraordinarily busy time for me, which should explain why there have been fewer than normal postings in The Rap Sheet during the last month. Following the most recent holiday madness, I took on the task of helping to remodel two rooms in my house—both of which I’d passed on redoing when I first moved into this now 110-year-old Seattle residence back in the late 1990s. Tearing off wallpaper and removing baseboards, mudding and sanding walls, painting everything again, and then building new bookcases has caused a serious strain on my writing hours. I’m burning candles at more than their two ends. I apologize to readers for not being more active on The Rap Sheet and Killer Covers than I have been lately, but with any luck, this test of my construction skills should end soon. I hope ...

Meanwhile, let me pass along a passel of news items that should be of some interest to crime-fiction readers.

• With the centennial of author John D. MacDonald’s birth coming up in July (on July 24, to be exact) Florida’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune newspaper has initiated a series of remembrances it calls “John D. and Me.” Installment number one came from writer John Jakes, while Stephen King provided the initial follow-up. Other contributors have been Tim Dorsey, Jeffery Deaver, Don Bruns, and Heather Graham. Unless things go awry, you should be able to keep up with the series entries here.

• And if that isn’t enough …: Robert Fulford from Canada’s National Post looks at how MacDonald invented the subgenre of Florida crime fiction, and how it has grown and evolved since his death in 1986.

• This should be especially welcome news for fans of Erle Stanley Gardner’s clever, sometimes comical Bertha Cool and Donald Lam detective series, which he wrote under the pseudonym A.A. Fair. In December 2016, Hard Case Crime will publish an unexpected and forgotten 30th installment of that series, titled The Knife Slipped. “Lost for more than 75 years,” HCC explains on its Web site, “The Knife Slipped was meant to be the second book in the series but got shelved when Gardner’s publisher objected to (among other things) Bertha Cool’s tendency to ‘talk tough, swear, smoke cigarettes, and try to gyp people.’ But this tale of adultery and corruption, of double-crosses and triple identities—however shocking for 1939—shines today as a glorious present from the past, a return to the heyday of private eyes and shady dames, of powerful criminals, crooked cops, blazing dialogue, and delicious plot twists.” Oh, and the cover of this novel was painted by the legendary Robert McGinnis. I can’t wait to get my hands on The Knife Slipped!

• From In Reference to Murder: “Sherlock fans may be disappointed to hear that the fourth season of the show probably won’t air until sometime in 2017, according to PBS president Paula Kerger. Although the show will begin production early this year, the busy schedules of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman add up to a delay in Sherlock’s timeline.” Well, darn it all!

• Oh no, say it isn’t so: The much-maligned 1990 ABC-TV series Cop Rock, a “musical police drama” co-created by Steven Bochco (of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue), is finally due out in DVD format. Television Obscurities reports that the full series will be released by Shout! Factory this coming May 17. “The 3-disc set will include the 11 episodes plus new interviews with creator Steven Bochco, co-star Anne Bobby, and others,” the blog explains. “Shout! calls the release a ‘cause for both celebration and a long-overdue reappraisal of a series that has been called one of the most unusual programs of all time.’” Unusual isn’t the same thing as saying it was good.

• Editor Janet Rudolph will focus the next edition of her magazine, Mystery Readers Journal, on New York mysteries, and she’s now in the market for reviews (50-250 words), articles (250-1,000 words), and Author! Author! essays (500-1,500 words) to fill out the contents. If you’d like to make a submission, contact Rudolph at janet@mysteryreaders.org. The deadline for copy is February 20.

• Alcatraz Island in 1880, long before that hump in San Francisco Bay hosted one of America’s most notorious penitentiaries.

• To celebrate the half-century anniversary of their small-screen debut in 1966, The Monkees—“the greatest fake band ever assembled for a madcap TV show”—will release a new album, titled Good Times!, and engage in “a lengthy North American tour kicking off May 18 in Fort Myers, Florida,” reports Mashable.

• The Booksteve Channel has early publicity clips for The Monkees.

• The Thrill Begins, a blog presented under the auspices of the International Thriller Writers, spent all of this last week interviewing crime and mystery fiction critics, sometimes with humorous results. The reviewers being grilled were Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders, Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books, Katrina Niidas Holm of the late, great Life Sentence, Carole Barrowman from Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Benoit Lievre of Dead End Follies.

• I was very sorry to hear about the passing, at age 73, of fiction anthologist and cinema historian Jon Tuska, who wrote—among many other works—1978’s The Detective in Hollywood: The Movie Careers of the Great Fictional Private Eyes and Their Creators, which I have long considered a must-have resource book. According to his obituary, Tuska breathed his last on Monday, January 18, “after a brief battle with cancer.” That note goes on to explain:

He graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee in 1966. He was a renaissance man, known worldwide for his expertise on Western films and fiction. He wrote or edited over 30 books, consulted on television projects, taught and lectured, and between 1983 and 1991, he was associated with Oregon Public Broadcasting as the host of several classical music programs. In 1991, with his wife, Vicki Piekarski, he founded Golden West Literary Agency, which represented many of the authors of classic Western fiction.

A list of Tuska’s books can be found here.

I was fortunate to meet and interview Tuska in the early 1980s for a Portland, Oregon-based arts magazine called Stepping Out, and I’m sure I still have that particular issue someplace in my files, though I can’t seem to lay my hands on it right now. If and when I do locate that edition, though, I shall certainly post my interview with Tuska on this page. (Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

• The first part of David F. Walker’s new John Shaft comic-book series, Imitation of Life, is due out this week, and though I don’t see a print edition available yet, Amazon has the Kindle version for sale here. Steve Aldous, author of The World of Shaft, offers a sampling of the interior art here. He has also posted the covers from Part II and Part III of this story, along with this link to a new interview with Walker in Bleeding Cool.

• This is rather unexpected. It turns out that the book “Britons are most likely to have lied about reading” is … Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. I’d have expected it to be Leo Tolstoy’s mammoth War and Peace, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or maybe even David Foster Wallace’s self-indulgent but nonetheless oft-lauded Infinite Jest. But no. Britain’s Telegraph lists 20 works of fiction (more than that, if you count the Harry Potter series installments separately) that residents of Great Britain claim to have read, when in fact they have not. Of those, I’m pleased to say I have actually, truly digested all but a couple (including Fifty Shades of Gray—no thanks), and that while I haven’t read Alice’s Adventures myself, my mother did read it to me as a small boy.

• I, for one, would be interested to know how this list compares with an equivalent study of American reading accomplishments.

• Crime Watch blogger Craig Sisterson writes on Facebook that New Zealand novelist Paul Cleave—whose Five Minutes Alone won the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel—“has reportedly been made an Honorary Literary Fellow in the New Zealand Society of Authors Waitangi Day Honours (for those outside New Zealand, Waitangi Day is New Zealand's national day). Very well deserved, and great to see Paul get some recognition among the local literary world.”

• Author Max Allan Collins has recently been writing quite a bit in his blog about his repeatedly delayed heart surgery (fingers crossed for Collins’ swift recovery—whenever the procedure is done!), but in last week’s post he added this good news:

[M]y complete novel version of Road to Perdition the movie is due to be published along with reprints of Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise. You may recall that my Perdition novelization was reduced to a pale shadow of itself back in the day—a 40,000-word condensation of the 70,000-word novel is what was foisted upon the public (it even made the New York Times best-seller list). As a great man once said, “Pfui.” But we appear to be on the verge of vindication.

In addition, new editions of Black Hats and Red Sky in Morning are in the works, to be published under my own name for the first time (R.I.P., Patrick Culhane).

All five of these books will be published by Brash Books, which is in part the brainchild of my buddy Lee Goldberg.

• From Crimespree Magazine comes news that “The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library [have] announced the nominees for the 28th annual Minnesota Book Awards.” The category of Genre Fiction contains four novels: The Devereaux Decision, by Steve McEllistrem (Calumet Editions); The Grave Soul, by Ellen Hart (Minotaur); He’s Either Dead or in St. Paul, by D.B. Moon (Three Waters); and Season of Fear, by Brian Freeman (Quercus). The winner in this and seven additional categories will be declared on April 16.

• It seems that distinguished essayist and poet T.S. Eliot was a fan of Golden Age detective stories, at one point describing Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.”

• Critic Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column for February contains observations on the annual Hodder and John Murray Crime Party, a new edition of James Crumley’s 1978 classic yarn, The Last Good Kiss (due out in April from UK publisher Black Swan), new releases by Robert Crais, Susan Moody, and others, and a Golden Age of Crime Weekend event scheduled as part of the Essex Book Festival (March 1-31). Read all of Ripley’s piece on the Shots Web site.

• No surprise here: Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel, The Long Goodbye, is Benjamin Black’s favorite outing for Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. “Chandler never wrote with such passionate conviction as he does in this long and darkly tormented work,” opines Black, the alter-ego behind which Irish author John Banville produces his own works of crime fiction—including The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014), a sort-of-sequel to The Long Goobye. “In the figure of the best-selling but self-hating author Roger Wade, we glimpse an exaggerated version of Chandler himself, who throughout his writing life chafed under the label of ‘mere’ thriller-writer.” You’ll find all of Black/Banville’s thoughts on this matter in The Independent.

• Here’s something I didn’t know before: Allen Dulles, the first civilian director of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, was a friend of Ian Fleming and a follower of his James Bond spy adventures.

• Nancie Clare is back with another year of novelist interviews for the Speaking of Mysteries podcast, beginning 2016 with Joe R. Lansdale, author of the new Hap and Leonard tale, Honky Tonk Samurai. Her other recent respondents include Denise Mina (Blood Salt Water), Joe Clifford (Lamentation), and Robert Crais (The Promise).

• S.W. Lauden talks with Rob Hart, author of the brand-new Portland-based Ash McKenna novel, City of Rose.

• You might recognize Joseph Goodrich as the editor of Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950 (2012), but he’s also a playwright. And his adaptation of Queen’s 1942 novel, Calamity Town, had its “world premiere” in Calgary, Alberta, at the end of last month. The Calgary Herald called it “an example of economical and polished crime fiction that is as theatrical as it is intriguing.” Goodrich tells me that he’s already “been commissioned to do a second Nero Wolfe play for Park Square Theater in St. Paul [Minnesota]. It goes up in June/July of 2017.”

• I never cease to be amazed by the lengths some businesses—both respectable and dubious—will go to in order to obtain free advertising. Among the worst abusers are folks who fake comments on blogs such as this one (comments often rife with typos or so mangled that it’s obvious they come from non-English speaking countries), and incorporate into them their Web site URLs. An example was this response to a piece I wrote about this year’s Agatha Award nominees: “I want to thank you for the superb post!! I surely liked every bit of it. I’ve bookmarked your internet site so I can take a appear at the latest articles you post later on.” At the end was a link to a “commode chair manufacturer.” Needless to say, I deleted that comment.

Jailbirds and Songbirds

It was 20 years ago next month that the “musical police drama” Cop Rock--created by Steven Bochco of Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law fame--debuted on ABC-TV in the States. Just three months later, after a run of 11 episodes, and despite promises from ABC execs that they’d be patient with the series’ efforts to build an audience, it was canceled due to poor ratings.

In the decades since, Cop Rock has been a frequent fixture on lists of the worst television shows ever made. However, it still claims some die-hard fans. Among them longtime American journalist-humorist Lewis Grossberger, who wrote of the program earlier this year in True/Slant:

I loved it. I thought it was great.

Everyone else--every single other living person in the entire world--thought it sucked. Protests broke out in Chad. The Uzbeks were enraged. Bhutan declared war. (fortunately no one noticed)

Said the entire world as one:

Law-enforcement personnel who suddenly burst into song? Why, that’s unrealistic. It strains credulity. Such things do not happen in real life. My puny, pea-sized imagination can’t handle it. Please, you’re making my head hurt.

Cop Rock was taken out and shot. No way it could be allowed to sully a distinguished network schedule that featured such blue-ribbon fare as Jake and the Fatman, Doogie Howser, M.D. and Beverly Hills 90210. It became a legendary, iconic symbol of overreaching hubristic loserliness like Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar (also underrated), General Custer (not underrated), Titanic (the ship, not the movie, which is overrated) and George W. Bush.

But now look.

Cop Rock’s influence is all over the tube.

Without warning, characters burst into six-part harmony or trombone solos on Glee and Tremé and now there is TNT’s new Memphis Beat, a not-bad-but-I-doubt-if-I’ll-bother-watching-it-again cop show starring a police detective who moonlights as an Elvis tribute singer (not to be confused with an Elvis impersonator).

I confess that I was among those who loathed Cop Rock. I remember watching it only once, before deciding I had better things to do on Wednesday nights. Even the casting of James McDaniel and Ron McLarty in the show, and guest appearances by Bochco favorites Jimmy Smits and Michele Greene couldn’t get me to watch.

But recently I stumbled upon several clips from the series on YouTube, and was captivated by the weirdness of it all. I watched ever single scene I could find, several of which weren’t thoroughly horrendous. I’m embedding some of those clips below, starting with the Cop Rock main title sequence, its theme sung by Randy Newman:



Next we have a tuneful twist on the “roll call” sequences that were so familiar in Hill Street Blues:



This courtroom clip comes from Cop Rock’s first episode:



Now we have one of my favorite numbers, focusing on women vice cops wondering whether they can advertise their wares on the street:



And finally, here’s a scene in which a woman who had been promised by the Los Angeles cops that she wouldn’t be arrested for selling her baby (part of a sting operation, I gather), is charged anyway--and then confronts the female officer who led her on:



Click here to find more Cop Rock clips on YouTube. So far, there’s no DVD collection of the series. Maybe the studio doesn’t think it could sell enough of them to make their production worthwhile.

What Were They Thinking?

Funny. You don’t think about a TV series for years, and then all of a sudden its name seems to crop up everywhere. Just the other day, I was remarking on how the cancellation of Viva Laughlin reminded me of Cop Rock, a short-lived 1990 program that combined police drama with musical theater. Now, Cop Rock crops up once more in the Chicago Tribune’s roster of the “Top 25 Worst Shows Ever,” along with Manimal (1983) and 23 other series (such as Petticoat Junction, Joanie Loves Chachi, and The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage) that can’t even arguably be fit under the “crime fiction” rubric.

The list isn’t horrible, and the Trib tries to make it the subject of water-cooler talk by inviting readers to vote on which of its 25 they despised the most. But I’m a little surprised not to see a few other crime-related series on the list. I mean, what about Holmes & Yoyo and Beverly Hills Buntz, or B.A.D. Cats and Mrs. Columbo, or A Man Called Hawk (a Spenser: For Hire spinoff that criminally misused the great Avery Brooks in his Hawk role) and Baywatch Nights (a David Hasselhoff series--need I say more?--that started out as a detective show spinoff from Baywatch, but morphed into a ludicrous paranormal series in a desperate attempt to save itself)?

Heck, I would be more than willing to add Sledge Hammer!, The A-Team, and A Man Called Sloane to this roster as well, but know they all have their advocates. So why invite abuse upon myself?

Are there any truly awful crime, mystery, or legal series I’ve missed?

READ MORE: “The Worst TV Show Ever,” by Ken Levine.

A Gun at My Side, a Song in My Heart

The recent cancellation--after only two episodes were aired--of Viva Laughlin, a CBS-TV series about casino-owning that was executive-produced in part by actor Hugh Jackman, can’t help but bring back to mind an ABC-TV experiment, 1990’s Cop Rock. Like Laughlin, that earlier program, conceived by Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, NYPD Blue), also asked its cast members, police and crooks alike, to periodically launch into musical numbers. Their subject matter ranged from robberies and homicide to the quotidian functions of law enforcement. Looking back, it seems amazing that any competent network exec could have green-lit such a weird endeavor, but we found a few Cop Rock clips on YouTube (see here, here, and here) to remind everyone of the results.

And you thought American television was bad now ...

Bad from Birth

There have been so many dumb series on television over the years, that separating out those which were obviously doomed from the outset by their central premises demands some pretty serious consideration. Fortunately, the folks over at the Television Obscurities site have done the culling for us, compiling their list of the “10 Most Outlandish Television Concepts Ever.”

Only two crime-related shows appear on the site’s roster. The first is Holmes & Yo-Yo (1976-1977), which starred Richard B. Shull as a klutzy, disheveled police detective who was prone to injuring his partners, and John Schuck (somehow enticed away from McMillan & Wife to participate in this turkey) as his new, freakishly strong android partner. The second is Cop Rock, a much-hyped but short-lived Steven Bochco series that melded the police drama with musical theater. (“Within the course of the premiere episode,” TV Obscurites explains, “viewers witnessed a jury breaking into a gospel song about finding a man guilty, a young mother giving away her baby for $200 [and singing about it], and a police officer gunning down a cop-killer in cold blood.”)

Also making this “Outlandish” roster, but not crime-fiction-related, are The Second Hundred Years (about a man who’s frozen in 1900 and thawed out almost seven decades later), Woops! (a FOX sitcom set in the “aftermath of accidental global nuclear war, started when two boys playing with a toy at a parade set off a nuclear missile”), and the inevitable My Mother the Car, which starred Jerry Van Dyke as a guy whose dead mom is reincarnated as a 1928 “Porter” touring car. According to Wikipedia, Van Dyke passed up the title role in Gilligan’s Island (ultimately filled by Bob Denver) in order to make this Mother, believing Gilligan would be roundly and prompty rejected by TV audiences. Speaking of woops!