by Victor Pryor
History, as it turns out, has not been unkind to Cop Rock.
It came, was a go-to punchline for a little while, and vanished, leaving little in the way of legacy. Its colossal failure was subsumed by subsequent bombs, and eventually it became a forgotten footnote in history.
But here’s the thing about this massive failure: buried underneath its high concept gimmicky surface is the soul of a pretty good cop show. Which, happily, just helps to make the genuine insanity of the premise and execution mere icing on the cake.
The story goes like this: at one point, during the heyday of Hill Street Blues, Steven Bochco is approached by a Broadway producer who wants to make a musical version of the popular cop show. For what one would assume are obvious reasons, the idea was vetoed, but the idea stuck in Bochco’s head. So, years later, when it came time for Bochco to cash in on his acclaim, and very much against the advice of literally everybody he asked about it, Bochco went all in on a cop musical television series.
It has since been proven that television musicals can work, either creatively (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) or ratings-wise (Glee). And as it happens, this wasn’t even the only musical show to premiere that fall. There was the even shorter lived, hip-hop influenced Hull High, executive produced by Kenny Ortega, noted for his work on the High School Musical series and the very real possibility he ruined Billy Squier’s career.
But there’s a reason the existence Hull High is a fun fact I’ve trotted out to up the word count on an article entirely about the show Cop Rock, and it’s that doing something like this never in a million years would occur to Kenny Ortega:
But it would to Steven Bochco…
The setting for Cop Rock is contemporary (which is to say 1990) Los Angeles. Led by Captain Hollander, the cops go about their days trying to bust crime and protect the people. Aside from the boys on the street, we also spend a fair amount of time with Chief Kendrick (Ronny Cox), a wannabe cowboy who, if this show took place just a couple years later, would be tagged ‘politically incorrect’ and Mayor Plank (Barbara Bosson), the stern mayor in line for bigger things.
Okay: I promised myself I wouldn’t take cheap pot shots at the dated nature of the show, because it’s just too easy. But I would be derelict in my duties if I didn’t take a moment to point out that when the series starts out, the mayor looks like this:
(Remember that look; it will be important later…)
While the series is a true ensemble piece, the driving thread of the series is the fallout from Detective Vincent LaRusso (Peter Onorati, leaning on the Bruce Willis shtick really, really hard), who in the aftermath of a botched bust, murders a drug dealer who previously killed a cop. Hollander sets his sights on bringing LaRusso to justice, and the various twists of that story provide a thru-line that grounds all the other antics and gives the series a sense of progress.
The problem, as most people would have figured out before pouring millions of dollars into a major network series, is that musicals in general are an extremely difficult thing to do, let alone doing a full television season’s worth.
(Though obviously, in the end that turned out to not be a problem…)
In the end, Cop Rock makes the most common mistake when it comes to musicals: the idea that it’s just like any other type of thing, only with songs.
Whether it’s a TV show, a movie, or some third thing I can’t think of right now, a musical only works when the songs in question either further the story or bring insight into a character. If the songs don’t do either of these things, they have to be really, really good songs to avoid being anything more than a pointless distraction.
Keep in mind it took an act like Flight Of The Conchords years of performing onstage to accumulate enough quality music to sustain two seasons worth of television for their HBO show. And when they ran out of songs, they ended the show.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has a remarkably high batting average for their songs, which work so well because they’re tonally consistent with the program as a whole, connect to the various main characters’ emotional journeys, and maintain their own distinct interior reality within the narrative itself.
Glee sidesteps all of that entirely by simply licensing already popular music.
Cop Rock, on the other hand, decided that they would have one song per act, leading to an average of four to five songs per episode.
As you can imagine, quality control quickly becomes an issue…
ENOUGH PREAMBLE, HOW’S THE MUSIC?
…Of its time. Let’s put it like that.
Though they brought in a rotating army of songwriters for the rest of the series, all five songs from the initial pilot were written by Randy Newman, including the very first song, “We Got The Power,” which is, for lack of a better term, rap.
In case you’re not familiar, here is a picture of Randy Newman:
Now, far be it from me to stereotype, but I feel in my heart of hearts that, were you to pass this fellow on the streets, your instinct would not be to pay him money to write you a rap song.
And yet, here we are.
BRIEF SIDEBAR: Randy Newman also performs “Under The Gun,” the theme song that plays under the (ridiculous) opening credits, which consists of the main cast sitting in a dark room listening to Randy Newman play, all while smiling and bobbing their heads. For those of you unfamiliar with this period in time, that is insane; by 1990, exactly NOBODY was smiling and bobbing their heads to Randy Newman.
But… enough about that guy.
Honestly, most of the songs aren’t even that bad, as such. But they never really feel organic to whatever story is being told. And sometimes they even come off as… a little silly.
Yet at the end, we see a version of this series that could possibly work, as Kathleen Wilhoite (of Road House and Murphy’s Law fame) sings “Sandman,” a gentle, emotional ballad she sings to calm her baby… right before she sells her for drug money.
Which, yes, sounds absurd. But in context, it actually kind of works:
And all the way through, the show never quite gets over its overwhelming propensity for tonal dissonance, which is what any rational person would expect when you try to mix gritty, realistic cop drama with the heightened sort of stylization that basically defines the musical.
Hence, you get an emotionally raw blues song about a couple in an codependent relationship fighting to make it work, followed by an up tempo ditty about the mayor getting plastic surgery after she’s been told she’s too ugly to be a State Senate candidate, complete with foxy nurse backup dancers and the line “Bigger is better/when it’s underneath your sweater.” Or a defiant powerhouse where, while standing next to a burning cross, the wife of an embattled cop tells her children about the history of racism in America, followed by the bumbling Detective Gaines singing to himself about how he’s getting better while wandering around a parking garage because he can’t find his car.
The strangest thing of all is how they shoot the musical sequences. The realism that separates Bochco at his best from the formulaic procedural is an unsurprisingly poor fit with the over-the-top style of the musical. So while there are dance numbers here and there, and very rarely a full-on fantasy sequence, most of the time it’s just one person singing to another (or in front of a group), and the other person/people are just… looking at them:
RESOLVED: There is no easier way to break the delicate spell a musical sequence casts than to load it up with a metric shit-ton of nonreactive reaction shots.
OKAY, SO THAT’S THE MUSIC. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE NON-MUSIC?
Well, it’s got a certain low-key charm to it. None of the characters are particularly deep, but they all get at least a moment or two to shine. William Thomas Jr. as LaRusso’s partner Detective Potts gets some meaty material in particular, as he finds himself trapped between his former friend and Captain Hollander, who is willing to go to extremes to keep LaRusso off the streets.
As for LaRusso, basically the linchpin of the whole thing, the show errs in making him too big a bastard before pulling it back halfway through and trying to make him more sympathetic (mostly by having him talk a lot less and act kind of sad sometimes). But by the end, they’ve put him in a position where I was genuinely disappointed that I would never find out where he went from here.
The biggest names in the cast (and the most fun to watch) are Ronny Cox Kendrick and Vonde Curtis-Hall as his deputy, Warren Osborne. Cox is a cartoon, but a deeply amusing one, especially when his former nemesis Mayor Plank gets plastic surgery so she looks like this now:
(I told you that would come back later…)
An enamored Kendrick turns into a bashful schoolboy around her, and their ensuing romance is both hilariously awkward and oddly sweet.
Curtis-Hall does quiet, commanding work as the coolest customer in the entire series. He makes literally every scene he’s in better, just by being in it.
(BTW, for future star watchers, an impossibly young Gina Gershon has one of her earliest roles as a stalking victim; and Sheryl Crow shows up for a tune where undercover female cops sing about wanting to catch a serial rapist… again: it never stops being That Show)
But what stands out, especially in this day and age, is how matter of fact the show is about delving into racial issues. Two years out from the Rodney King incident, Cop Rock, of all shows, makes tensions between a mostly white police force and the black communities they service an ongoing theme. The racial component of a white man shooting a black offender is examined from multiple angles, and the difficulty of being a black cop in America gets explored at one point or another. Network shows in this day and age very rarely stray into that territory, and they certainly don’t stay there for as long and keep such a measured view as we see here.
Which is why it’s such a problem that the show seems to advocate an ‘Us vs. Them’ mentality when it comes to the crooks themselves, perhaps exemplified by the ensemble piece “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”
Hint: they’re not talking about literal garbage…
In the show all the criminals are all evil incarnate, with little to no nuance. The one time they offer even an inkling of a rebuttal, it’s the “Lament Of The Line-Up Guys,” where a gang of Latinos are called in for a lineup which turns into a dance routine/tirade against racial profiling… which is immediately undercut when it is revealed that one of the guys in the lineup is actually the culprit, and the (also Latina) witness was protecting him.
And in a subplot where a 6-year-old boy is shot in a drive-by, instead of showing remorse, the shooter raps about how hard he is, and how being in jail will increase his rep. They took what could have been a more interesting story of regret and repentance and traded it in for some kind of cheap hip-hop condemnation.
(SIDEBAR: Aside from its dumb-ass title, “Life In The Hood Ain’t No Piece Of Pie” deserves credit for actually being a decent approximation of the gangster rap of this period. So if any of you guys were planning on shitting on it for being inauthentic, the Spice 1 mixtape in my dresser drawer gives me the authority to say that I WAS THERE AND THIS IS WHAT IT SOUNDED LIKE. There was Big Daddy Kane, Too Short, Boogie Down Productions, Rakim… and then there were a ton of motherfuckers you don’t remember that sounded JUST. LIKE. THIS.)
Look, when I was growing up, Cop Rock was a joke. In fact, at the tender age of 10, it was the first show I recognized to be a conceptually bad idea, which is an important milestone in the life of a budding critic. So with all of that history, it’s bizarre that I find myself forced to take it seriously on some level. More to the point, it’s shocking to me how into it I wound up being. There’s nothing more I want to do than go over every last bit of weirdness this show has to offer. I want to link to every song. I want to tell you about what Chief Kendrick keeps in his office closet. And I want to spoil the very last scene of the show, which made me instantly nostalgic for the whole experience.
But if there’s one thing I want to do above all else, it’s leave you with this one, inarguable truth:
NUMBER OF EMMYS WON BY COP ROCK: 2
NUMBER OF EMMYS WON BY THE WIRE: 0
… I rest my case.
SPECIAL FEATURES
Extras include a mildly informative text commentary by so-called “pop culture historian” Russell Dyball and interviews with actress Anne Bobby and Steven Bochco himself, in which he reveals that some of the actors were chosen for their singing chops as opposed to their acting ability. Which… is not the revelation he might think it is. It also comes with a printable copy of the press kit they sent out to publicize the show, which has the show logo as its letterhead and Bochco’s production company icon at the bottom of every page. It’s pretty freakin’ cool, actually…
Cop Rock is now available on DVD from Shout Factory.
Get it at Amazon:
Cop Rock — [DVD]
