COURTROOM POLICE - GANGSTERS batch1/20260907_174124

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## HEADING: COURTROOM POLICE - GANGSTERS
## LEFT COLUMN
1840. C O P   R O C K.
Debut.
(A police musical series.) 9/26/90

1841. C O P   R O C K .
Musical police series. 12/12/90
Last show of series. 12/26/90
MANIAC COP. (1988)
ABOVE THE LAW. (1988)
w/Steven Seagal & Henry Silva.

1842. AGAINST THE LAW:
Series Debut. 9/23/90
w/Michael O'Keefe & Suzanne Douglas

1843. SUPER FORCE:
Series Debut.(Future cop) 9/21/90
w/Ken Olandt & Patrick Macnee.

1844. True Blue (Series Debut) 12/3/89
NYPD Emergency Services Unit rescues.
## RIGHT COLUMN
1846. CRIMES OF PASSION:
James Woods host: 10/26/88
A teen-age homicide in Iowa.
A Houston newsman 'Fatal Attraction'.
CRIMES OF THE HEART. (1986)
w/Diane Keaton; Jessica Lange, Sissy
Spacek & Sam Shepard.
HARD COPY: Former Lovers. 2/12/90
CRIMES OF PASSION: 3/4/90
Mystery in Kenya. 1941 murder of
Lord Erroll. 'White Mischief' movie.

1847. LAW & ORDER:
Crime series of late have taken to a
deglamorized, down-and-dirty view of
the criminal-justice system, to achieve
realism or something that passes for it.
This interesting new series (Tuesdays
at 10 P.M. [ET] on NBC) goes all the
way, dumping the last vestiges of glam-
our like a bad habit, for an unsenten-
talized depiction of New York cops and
prosecutors at work. And as the show
settles into the season and finds its
style, it starts to look like a local news
report.

Those hand-held cameras and
grainy-film, natural-light exposures,
shaky pans and low angles (in early
episodes, at least) all give the series a
harsh, one-take look that resembles the
hasty but competent shooting and edit-
ing of big-city TV news. The color satu-
ration has been burned down, leaving
landscapes and people with a leached-
out, ashen appearance that suggests the
whole town has stayed up too late.

Do I like it? Yes. Watching it is like
drinking bourbon straight. We get no
coddling here, no sentimental payoffs.
There's very little background music.
There is hardly a hint of sex, let alone
romance. The actors aren't even pretty
to look at. This show is not for wimps.

Part of the story deals with the cops
finding the crook; then the assistant
DAs move in to prosecute the crook. It
all looks low-budget, the way real cops
and criminal lawyers and their environs
look low-budget.

In a typical story, detectives Max
Greevey and Mike Logan (George
Dzundza and Chris Noth) are called in
when a stabbed
"vic" is found collapsed by his car. The
victim is a city councilman on the take,
the two young thugs who robbed him
found him already wounded, and our
cops begin to uncover a similarly vein of
corruption that winds through city gov-
ernment. Max is a blunt-faced, over-
weight copper with a bad haircut and
a cynical outlook. Logan is lean and
pale and likes to sweat suspects.

They pass the case along to prosecu-
tors Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty, above
right) and Paul Robinette (Richard
Brooks, above left) who find that the
bagmen include city councilmen and a
prominent police inspector. Stone is a
smug but hard-working WASPish char-
acter with a receding hairline, Robinette
is young and solemn and still trying to
stave off disillusionment.

Sometimes the prosecutors take the
case to court, sometimes they hammer
out a deal in the office. In the Law &
Order universe, the police routinely lie
to suspects, politicians cover their be-
hinds, everything is negotiable, and the
last guy out turns off the lights. The
leaner and bleaker the show gets, the
more it distinguishes itself from other
cops-and-robbers shows, and the better
I like it.

Executive producer Dick Wolf, who
created the series, gives us no glorifying
footage of New York scenery. But out-
door scenes are clearly shot there, and
they look right. There's even something
of a New York attitude in the show's
style: Hey, ya want crime? Here it is.
Now shut up.

w/Geo. Dzundza, Chris North, M. Moriarty