One of the worst aspects of broadcast television is the violence it brings into our living rooms. Study after study has demonstrated that violence on TV does affect the children - perhaps even the adults - who watch it.
And yet "Brooklyn South" - which opens with one of the most violent sequences ever on network television - cannot be dismissed or ignored. You can make a case that the violence in the show's opening minutes is the way all violence on television should be portrayed."Brooklyn South" (9 p.m., CBS/Ch. 2) is certainly not ground-breaking TV. It comes to us from Steven Bochco and the producers of "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue," and it is derivative of both shows - it's a large ensemble drama about the lives of police officers, both on and off duty.
And the lives of this cast of characters get shaken up pretty badly in the first nine minutes of tonight's premiere. "Brooklyn South" reaches out and grabs you, then takes you on a particularly harrowing journey.
The cocaine-addicted suspect in a bank robbery/murder wanders the streets of Brooklyn, shooting anyone who vaguely annoys him. He's headed for the local police precinct to kill as many cops as he can.
Bodies and blood are all over the place. (This episode of "Brooklyn South" is the first episode of any series on any network to receive a TV-MA content rating - the television equivalent of an R-rated movie, for mature audiences only. It's no R-rated action film, but it is extremely violent for broadcast television.)
The violence reaches a crescendo when one of the cops has a large hole shot in the top of his head. It's the sort of scene that will leave viewers gasping in shock and horror - which is exactly what the writers and producers intended.
"What we were trying to do was to expose the audience to one source of reality in a cop's life, which would prepare the audience to understand a moment which came later," said executive producer David Milch.
That moment comes when the officers wound the gunman and drag him back to the precinct, roughing him up along the way. The policemen openly mock and taunt the emergency medical technicians as they attempt to save the gunman's life.
Under circumstances that are not made clear, the gunman dies. And internal affairs begins an investigation, prodded by the dead man's sister and African-American community activists. (The gunman was black; most of the cops involved are white.)
According to Milch, "the full resonance" of this sequence "will take an entire year to live into." And what he wanted was for the audience to have a "visceral" reaction to the violence.
In other words, he wanted viewers to have the same emotional reaction that the police officers in the show have. To actually root for the perpetrator to die.
Again, Milch and his team succeed. Viewers find themselves reacting purely on emotion without stopping to think.
And the violence in "Brooklyn South" is handled responsibly. It's horrifying and awful, not glamourous - there are no superheroes dodging gunfire and shooting people dead with little blood or thought.
Kids should not be watching "Brooklyn South." But it's difficult to imagine that any who do will want to emulate either the heroes or the villains in this show.
But make no mistake about it - the cops are the heroes in "Brooklyn South." This is no more an anti-police series than "Hill Street" or "NYPD Blue."
Which is not to say that the characters in "Brooklyn South" are perfect. The pilot introduces a large number of storylines that begin fleshing the principles out immediately. Among those are:
- Jimmy Doyle (Dylan Walsh), who is, perhaps, the heart of the show. A great cop and a caring individual, Doyle has helped raise his sister (A.J. Langer of "My So-Called Life") and brother (Patrick McGraw) - a young man who has just been accepted to the police academy.
- Sgt. Francis X. Donovan (Jon Tenney) - another good cop - is caught up in something that he doesn't really want to be part of.
- Officer Jake Lowery (Titus Welliver) is saddled with a shrewish tramp of a wife.
- Officer Anne-Marie Kersey (Yancy Butler) has to deal with the death of her fiance, who is killed in the shootout.
- James B. Sikking ("Hill Street Blues," "Doogie Howser, M.D."), an investigator from Internal Affairs, is charged with finding out the circumstances behind the perpetrator's death.
The cast also includes Gary Basaraba, Michael DeLuise, Richard T. Jones, Adam Rodriguez and Klea Scott.
"Brooklyn South" may not be anything new from Steven Bochco and his team, but it shows every sign of being another great police drama. And great dramas of any kind are relatively rare in network television.