PASADENA, Calif. — "City of Angels" is more than just TV's latest medical drama and the latest show from producer Steven Bochco. It's a symbol of hope for minorities in Hollywood and a gamble that TV viewers will do something they've never done before — embrace an hourlong drama with a predominantly black cast.
And, despite the fact that we've entered the 21st century, the question of whether things have changed enough so that a drama with so many black faces can succeed remains open.
"Yes, I think a lot has changed," said Bochco, whose credits include everything from "L.A. Law" to "Hill Street Blues" to "NYPD Blue." "Hell, I think in the past (few) months a lot has changed."
Indeed, the question of why there are so few minorities both in front of and behind the cameras in network television has been at the forefront of discussion for much of the past year. The NAACP has even threatened boycotts and has recently reached agreements with some networks who are promising to remedy the situation.
"I think there's a consciousness about this issue which, if we do our jobs right, hopefully will translate into a significant sampling of our show," Bochco said. "We believe that if we can get enough people to come and take a look at this show, they're not going to go away."
And that, of course, is the other big question. The show is getting a big push from CBS — it premieres Sunday in "Touched by an Angel's" regular time slot (7 p.m. on Ch. 2) before moving to Wednesdays at 7 p.m. But is "City of Angels" good enough to keep viewers coming back?
Unfortunately, if the first two episodes are any indication, the answer to that question is no. This is not a bad show, but it's not a particularly compelling one, either.
"City" is set in an inner-city hospital where most of the staff and patients are either black or Hispanic. Blair Underwood ("L.A. Law") stars as Dr. Ben Turner, the hospital's acting chief of surgery, and Vivica A. Fox is Dr. Lilian Price, the new medical director who has been brought in to turn the place around, renew its accreditation and help drum up support for a new facility.
(She replaces a doctor played by guest star Garrett Morris, who in rather typical Bochco fashion is fired after having a close encounter with a corpse in the show's opening minutes.)
And Turner and Price, ho-hum, used to be engaged.
Bochco, who is white, co-created the show with Paris Barclay, a black man who has won Emmys for his directing on "NYPD Blue." The show's writing staff is about half black and half white.
"In my 30-plus years of working in television, I don't think I've ever had as much fun as we have every day with our writing group because it's a fully integrated room," Bochco said. "It's thrilling. You hear anecdotes. You hear life experience. You hear voices that we normally don't access."
This is a show that you can't help but root for because of what's on the line. And the current controversy over minorities on TV gives Bochco an added sense of urgency about the prospects for "City of Angels."
"I just want to make a good show and I'm not being disingenuous," he said. "But I'm very conscious of the significance of this show."
The fact is that if "City of Angels" becomes just another failed black drama, it will be that much harder to get another one on the air no matter how good it is.
"I'm conscious of the fact that you don't see a lot of people doing cop musicals. And there's a real simple reason for it because when we did it, it failed large," said Bochco, whose series "Cop Rock" was indeed a big failure. "So I do have a sense that if this show succeeds, there will be many shows to follow that will seek to emulate the kind of work we're doing (and) the way in which we're doing it.
"If we don't succeed, it just becomes that much more difficult in an economically driven industry to encourage networks to take these kinds of chances."
But, again, this just isn't a real good show — it pales in comparison with "ER," for example. The first two episodes contain nothing in the way of surprises; the plot is telegraphed almost from the first moments.
Underwood is underwhelming, and Fox is, frankly, awful. She's completely unbelievable in the part, and her failings do major damage to "City of Angels" and its prospects.
Oddly, some of the supporting characters are better than the leads. The hospital administrator (Michael Warren), a pure political animal, shows promise; a county commissioner (Robert Morse) who's trying to help both the hospital and himself is intriguing; and a young Jewish doctor (Phil Buckman) and a young black doctor (T.E. Russell), both of whom feel like they're the victims of racism, provide some degree of promise to the show.
(It's also odd that, while most of the cast is black, most of the interesting characters are white or Hispanic.)
Although "City of Angels" is carrying the hopes of multiculturalism, it is not really a show about race. Bochco said that racism and race relations will always be an underlying theme of "City of Angels," but not necessarily a front-burner storyline.
"It's a hospital, and you've got people coming in the door who are sick and dying and frightened," Bochco said. "And, by and large, they don't care about race issues. They care about getting well . . . . That said, this hospital, serving an inner-city community populated predominantly be a black and Hispanic population, issues of race inevitably will begin to leak through the fabric of the show. But they are going to, hopefully, come to the fore as the legitimate backwash of good storytelling. For me, anytime we try to build a story around a social or political thematic, we've got the tail wagging the dog."
And everyone involved wants to make it clear that, while "City of Angels" has a largely black cast, it is not a "black" show, which Underwood postulates was the reason other "black" dramas failed.
"One of the reasons I think that shows haven't worked in the past is because they've been too specific to the black experience every minute of the hour," Underwood said. "And I love those shows. I relate to them. But I think it helps to marginalize ourselves if we're looking to a broader audience."
And Barclay is convinced that there is a broader audience out there for the show.
"What 'The Cosby Show' showed us is that if you write a show that is universal in its themes . . . people will come," Barclay said. "And that's what 'City of Angels' is trying to do. It's a hospital melodrama where people's lives are saved every day by heroic doctors who care. Yes, there are questions of race, but that's not the primary reason we're doing it.
"What we're trying to say is, yes, there was a greater group of executive producers, writers and directors who are creating shows and putting them in front of the networks constantly, and if the networks are willing to look at those shows, then the diversity factor wouldn't be an issue at all."
Still, Bochco said that the underutilization of minorities in Hollywood "was my original motivation for wanting to do this show."
"There's just an extraordinary talent pool underutilized in our business, both in New York and Los Angeles," he said. "And ever since we were doing 'Hill Street Blues' — and, in fact, before that with 'Paris' — I was so struck by the gifted people who were clamoring to do the tiniest little roles because there just were not enough good roles available."
And he thought it was "just a waste" that more shows weren't developed for minority actors.
"I just hope that if you present a really entertaining drama, people are going to watch it," Bochco said. "From the network point of view, I don't think racism is an issue. I think economics is an issue. When things that you try don't succeed, there's a reluctance to try them again. When they do succeed, you try them over and over again.
"That said. if I'm a black artist in this community, I don't give a (expletive) what the reason is, the reality is I don't have a job. So I think all of us doing this show, while we're not going to be handcuffed by our sense of importance of what we're trying to do, we're certainly aware of it."
THIRD TIME AROUND: "City of Angels" is the third Bochco series Michael Warren has appeared in. He's best known for his role in the long-running, Emmy-winning "Hill Street Blues," but Warren also co-starred with James Earl Jones in "Paris," a drama that lasted but 13 episodes during the 1979-80 season.
"What I saw in him (Bochco) was a guy who always had an open-door policy," Warren said, "which is rare for an actor to be able to go in and sit down and talk about your character."
And Warren said that Bochco actually apologized to him for the failure of "Paris."
"But he said, 'But I have and idea that I'm working on now with someone else and I'd like you to look and I would love for you to be involved," Warren said. "That was 'Hill Street Blues.' And that experience was second to none.
"He was a great person to work for. To be around. We became friends as a result of that experience. He's just a man who is able to bring you substantive shows with entertainment. It is not be accident, in my mind, that he is doing a show that has minorities very much involved, not only in front of the camera but behind the camera as well. I've always felt that if there was one person who could make a show work where it presented minorities as human beings, it was Steven. So I look forward to this experience."