NYPD BLUE

It was time to change my allegiance.

Much as when I drew a line after two series of "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" a couple of years ago (A tale of sadness which never even found a place here in BlogWorld), dear old "Sixie" has had to be abandoned at the end of series three after becoming (if at all possible) even more annoying than it was at the end of series two a few weeks earlier.

Sorry, my Bionic pal, but I really couldn't take any more of your antics, especially after Stephanie Powers had turned up in that electric blue alien catsuit spouting lines which would have seemed laughable in a 1930s space serial, and eagle-eyed Sixie failed to recognise the astronaut/journalist/criminal was being played this week by his then real-life wife for the third time in three years. A simple "Don't I know you?"would have lifted it towards wittiness, but ignoring it just proved witless.

Still, you know, "Blue… blue…" there's a train of thought in there somewhere, you know... because everything's connected, and such is the holistic nature of my telly viewing that there was a rather straightforward leap which could be made here.

And indeed, in the absence of all those cheesy slo-mo heroics, there was a void to be filled in my viewing opportunities and so my latest telly obsession has become (Just in case you couldn't guess from the title of this piece) the USTV series "NYPD: Blue" which ran for a dozen seasons between 1993 and 2005 and which I used to watch avidly until it got poached from the channel I used to watch it on, to some dark, mysterious "other" place which I didn't then have access to.

Still, once upon a time, I liked the show so very much that I started collecting the DVD Box Sets when they started to appear shortly before the show got cancelled in the States, but those then promptly stalled after the release of season four about eight years ago and left me dangling on a cliffhanger that I'd long since forgotten about.

How do you keep an idiot in suspense…?

Well, anyway, this idiot recently found out that the later seasons had started to become available again about a year ago and, after waiting an almost interminable time for the prices to drop, I gave up and "treated" myself to a couple of boxes so that I could pick up those treads again and bring myself back into that strangely monosyllabic world that I once admired so very much.

The problem was always that, even when I did used to watch the show on transmission, the broadcasts were so sporadic that by the time the next season came along, all of the twists and turns (and faces) that featured in the previous one had kind of slipped from my mind and so I spent quite a while just picking up the threads as I tried to decipher the "Previously on..." montage which occasionally went back to events which had occurred years earlier, and which featured storylines which found me going "Huh?" instead of "Ah!" because I wasn't quite so avid about remembering them as I once was with some other shows I watch. Anyway, now, when I can binge-view them in blocks, the ongoing story lines suddenly make a great deal more sense and I'm having a lot more fun absorbing the schadenfreude of those lives at the more miserable end of that fictionalised life in the Big Apple.

To my mind, Detective Andy Sipowicz, as played by the blue-collar looking Dennis Franz (who just looks like I imagine a real cop would look like) developed into possibly one of the greatest television characters that there has ever been, at least in the past two decades since blandness and good looks became the tedious standard for all kinds of television series.

He started off as a loud-mouthed, alcoholic bigot, albeit one played by a pussycat, and moved up, due to various shifts in the behind-the-scenes story of the developing series, from "second banana" to the definite lead character of the show and, whilst he tends to get forgotten about in many of those "Greatest TV Character Ever" polls, I firmly believe that he should be in the top ten, not least because of his deadpan hysterical asides muttered in the presence of so much of the badness in the world even after his own life gets literally shot to hell.

So, despite the famous (and actually relatively rare) scenes including rather chaste nudity, and less occasional glimpses of massive 1990s trousers, and example after example of stupid, stupid "perps" giving it up to our noble band of New York Detectives, what else do these tales of the 15th precinct have to offer?

Well, the series I've just gorged upon shows the confident, pre-9/11 city in all its glory as it rattled towards the end of the twentieth century and, whilst it was rather personally upsetting watching the episodes where Bobby Simone leaves, the arrival of Rick Schroder is actually a breath of fresh air after two long storylines both involving main characters suffering in hospitals.

Meanwhile, the supporting cast, sometimes acting as the chorus to the Greek Tragedies unfolding before them, are developing nicely, even though they tend to chop and change rather too regularly for my tastes (usually - like in real life - just after I've got to like them), and develop strange "out of character" traits just before disappearing forever "in the wind..."

Mind you, there's always Greg Medavoy, the middle-aged, stumbling, socially awkward red-haired detective, and hurrah for him.

Anyway, perhaps, against my better judgement, even though you know my completist nature would never have resisted, I've just acquired a couple more series to work my way through... So I'll be devouring them over the next couple of months and I may report back later because, as with "M*A*S*H" the zeitgeist will tell you that there's a perceived dip in quality as the seasons go by, but I suspect that I'll still be enjoying this show right until "Moving Day" from 2005.