What Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson are attempting is nothing less than reconfiguring a TV standard -- the police drama.
The producers of "Homicide: Life On the Street" haven't exactly started from scratch with "The Beat," which premieres Tuesday at 8 p.m. on UPN-Ch. 14, but they've tried to jigger the conventions, the look and the style enough to make something that doesn't look just like all the other cop shows that have come before."So on pretty much every level, we've tried to play around with something that has been around a long time," Fontana said in a recent interview with TV critics. "The thing is, when you say you're going to do a cop show, you say to yourself, 'So what?' So what we tried to answer was why we wanted to make this particular cop show."
"The Beat" certainly looks different. The footage jumps from film to video, at times seemingly at random. The show is shot using film, Super 16 and small digital cameras, "the little ones you can just hold in the palm of your hand," Levinson explained.
"When we're dealing with the police world, we're using the digitals," said Levinson, who directed the pilot of "The Beat". "And when we're doing more of their personal lives, we're doing Super 16."
"We've seen a lot of video in terms of police things in the past, so it seems like it would be interesting to be able to take that another two or three steps past just that regular video-type of thing and kind of do a special treatment to it and use a mixed media to it," Fontana said. "I think the language of film continues to evolve, and I think this is one way to do that."
It's different, but annoying. Although, like the unsteady hand-held footage in "Homicide," you tend to get used to it. (And chances are, as with "Homicide," that the camera tricks may be toned down a bit as the series progresses.)
But it's more than just the technical aspects that separate "The Beat" from "NYPD Blue."
"The thing about the show, it's not just the visual style that's different," Fontana said. "We are trying to tell a traditional narrative story. We're trying to, basically, tell bits and pieces of the four characters' lives. And we've even changed the act breaks. Normally in an hour, you get a teaser and then four acts. And with this, we have what we call a prologue and an epilogue that are much shorter, and then the middle three acts are much longer than a normal show would be."
As for the characters . . . we're not talking about heroes here. "The Beat" follows two young New York police officers, Zane Marinelli (Mark Ruffalo) and Mike Dorigan (Derek Cecil), as they negotiate their jobs and the lives -- with an emphasis on the latter.
"I always thought it would be interesting, not necessarily to do the rookies, but to do people who are starting out in their lives and they're not so world-weary as our detectives in Baltimore (on 'Homicide') were," Fontana said. "They're still discovering things about the job and about their lives. They can make mistakes that are different than the kind of mistakes that a detective would make."
Zane has been a cop for 31/2 years; Mike for 3. And, despite the fact that events ranging from an ongoing protest over the death of a black man while in police custody to a serial pigeon-killer surround them on the job, the two officers are more concerned with their personal lives.
Mike is engaged to and living with Elizabeth (Poppy Montgomery), a resident at Bellevue. Zane, who became a cop because his father went to prison for killing his mother, is a one-night-stand kind of guy. But he's also involved -- sort of -- in a relationship with Beatrice (Heather Burns), a young woman who is seriously unbalanced.
How unbalanced? She torches Zane's apartment before the end of the first episode. And the relationship doesn't end there.
The officers' personal lives take precedence by design.
"A lot of my friends are New York cops, but you ask 90 percent of New York cops what the most important thing about them being a cop is and they will say, 'the pension,' " Fontana said. "They don't say, 'I want to protect and serve the law. I must maintain this, maintain that.' New York cops want to get to a scene, dissipate a problem or get the detectives there and move on."
"The Beat" isn't entirely successful at re-inventing the cop show. It's not entirely successful, period. The video style is jarring -- even grating at times. And the content is sometimes way too explicit -- the language and sexual situations are over the top, almost bordering on porno at times. This is anything but a family show.
But, at least through the first three episodes, the characters are interesting and the writing and performances are good.
"The Beat" is certainly a leap up from most of what UPN airs.
What Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson are attempting is nothing less than reconfiguring a TV standard -- the police drama.
The producers of "Homicide: Life On the Street" haven't exactly started from scratch with "The Beat," which premieres Tuesday at 8 p.m. on UPN/Ch. 14, but they've tried to jigger the conventions, the look and the style enough to make something that doesn't look just like all the other cop shows that have come before.
"So on pretty much every level, we've tried to play around with something that has been around a long time," Fontana said in a recent interview with TV critics. "The thing is, when you say you're going to do a cop show, you say to yourself, 'So what?' So what we tried to answer was why we wanted to make this particular cop show."
"The Beat" certainly looks different. The footage jumps from film to video, at times seemingly at random. The show is shot using film, Super 16 and small digital cameras, "the little ones you can just hold in the palm of your hand," Levinson explained.
"When we're dealing with the police world, we're using the digitals," said Levinson, who's best known as a film director (and who directed the pilot of "The Beat"). "And when we're doing more of their personal lives, we're doing Super 16."
"We've seen a lot of video in terms of police things in the past, so it seems like it would be interesting to be able to take that another two or three steps past just that regular video-type of thing, and kind of do a special treatment to it and use a mixed media to it," Fontana said. "I think the language of film continues to evolve, and I think this is one way to do that."
It's different, but annoying. Although, like the unsteady hand-held footage in "Homicide," you tend to get used to it. (And chances are, as with "Homicide," that the camera tricks may be toned down a bit as the series progresses.)
But it's more than just the technical aspects that separate "The Beat" from "NYPD Blue."
"The thing about the show, it's not just the visual style that's different," Fontana said. "We are trying to tell a traditional narrative story. We're trying to, basically, tell bits and pieces of the four characters' lives. And we've even changed the act breaks. Normally in an hour, you get a teaser and then four acts. And with this, we have what we call a prologue and an epilogue that are much shorter, and then the middle three acts are much longer than a normal show would be."
As for the characters . . . we're not talking about a bunch of heroes here. "The Beat" follows two young New York police officers, Zane Marinelli (Mark Ruffalo) and Mike Dorigan (Derek Cecil), as they negotiate their jobs and the lives -- with an emphasis on the latter.
"I always thought it would be interesting, not necessarily to do the rookies, but to do people who are starting out in their lives and they're not so world-weary as our detectives in Baltimore (on 'Homicide') were," Fontana said. "They're still discovering things about the job and about their lives. They can make mistakes that are different than the kind of mistakes that a detective would make."
Zane has been a cop for 31/2 years; Mike for 3. And, despite the fact that events ranging from an ongoing protest over the death of a black man while in police custody to a serial pigeon-killer surround them on the job, the two officers are more concerned with their personal lives.
Mike is engaged to and living with Elizabeth (Poppy Montgomery), a resident at Bellevue. Zane, who became a cop because his father went to prison for killing his mother, is a one-night-stand kind of guy. But he's also involved -- sort of -- in a relationship with Beatrice (Heather Burns), a young woman who is seriously unbalanced.
How unbalanced? She torches Zane's apartment before the end of the first episode. And the relationship doesn't end there.
The officers' personal lives take precedence by design.
" A lot of my friends are New York cops, but you ask 90 percent of New York cops what the most important thing about them being a cop is and they will say, 'the pension,' " Fontana said. "They don't say, 'I want to protect and serve the law. I must maintain this, maintain that.' New York cops want to get to a scene, dissipate a problem or get the detectives there and move on.
"And so rather than in the kind of melodramatic television way of these uniformed cops getting involved in every little thing that happens along the way, what we're trying to represent is the fact that whatever crime thing they come across, it either affects them or it doesn't. But they're still moving through their lives. Their lives don't stop as a result of what happens to them necessarily as cops." "The Beat" isn't entirely successful at re-inventing the cop show. It's not entirely successful, period. The video style is jarring -- even grating at times. And the content is sometimes way too explicit -- the language and sexual situations are over the top, almost bordering on porno at times. This is anything but a family show.
But, at least through the first three episodes, the characters are interesting and the writing and performances are good.
"The Beat" is certainly a leap up from most of what UPN airs.