The TV Zone

August 19, 2007 Sunday
ALL EDITIONS

Steven Bochco blue?;

It's no longer as easy as ABC for the Emmy-Winning producer to deal with the networks

BYLINE: BY VERNE GAY. verne.gay@newsday.com

SECTION: FANFARE; Pg. C16

LENGTH: 1425 words

The man sitting in the big comfy chair in the big comfy office in Santa Monica looks familiar and sounds familiar but - in some hard-to-define way - he is not familiar at all. He turns 64 this December yet remains youthful in a way that only California and good genes can confer.
His hair is gray. His skin is unwrinkled. The voice - his voice - is a power voice. Low, modulated and smooth, one imagines that it can turn to fire, or flesh-eating acid, when the volume is cranked up. (Over a 40-year career, one also wonders how often that has occurred.)
But what is so different about Steven Bochco may be this: He is reflective and even philosophical. "I'm not chasing the way I used to," says someone who spent four decades in the chase and changed television in the process.
There is an autumnal air about Bochco.
And Bochco, you should understand, is not an autumnal sort of guy.
He is not chasing, nor is he hardly producing TV either. Steven Bochco Productions - the banner that flew over "NYPD Blue" for a more than a decade - started shooting a pilot for TNT this week entitled "Raising the Bar." It's about a public defender in the Bronx and stars Jane Kaczmarek and Mark-Paul Gosselaar.
But after that, zip.
No to the networks
An association with ABC (and more recently Touchstone) that dates back to 1987 ends shortly, and it will likely end badly. In late 2005, ABC asked Bochco to salvage the faltering "Commander in Chief," a drama about the first female U.S. President. Of that rescue mission, Bochco now ruefully says, "no good deed goes unpunished. ... It was a horrible, horrible experience. It really sort of crystallized the way in which the business has changed, and that's not for me anymore."
He has little interest in working for the networks - too much micromanaging - though readily admits the feeling may=2 0be mutual. "I don't think there's a big appetite for the stuff I like to do."
In the argot of the trade, Bochco is a reality-based drama producer in a business now crawling with "high-concept" fantasists who draw their inspiration from comic books. "You're looking at 400-year-old cops and detectives who are vampires. ... It's fine. I don't have any disdain for it. It's just not what I do."
What Bochco has done well are cop and legal dramas. He's arguably the most successful drama producer in TV history - nine Emmys, a pair of Humanitas prizes and a penchant for pushing the boundaries of content and language, which made him a controversial figure at the outset of "Blue's" run in 1993. (The word "blue," of course, was a double-entendre for the uniform of cops as well as their language and off-duty behavior.)
Mostly though, he just produced great TV: "Hill Street Blues," "L.A. Law," a pair of comedies for ABC ("Hooperman" and "Doogie Howser, M.D."), a cult hit ("Murder One") and what certainly was the most interesting failure of the past 20 years - "Cop Rock," a drama filled with crooning patrolmen and operatic lieutenants. (Bochco started his career back in the mid-'60s as a writer on "Ironside.")
" Blue," which he co-created with David Milch (who has an office just down the hall), made Bochco a household name in an industry where only stars are usually accorded such a distinction. Like "Hill Street" for NBC, it set the stage for an ABC resurgence and lent the once-maligned TV drama respect and even esteem.
Dennis Franz, "Blue's" Andy Sipowicz and a Bochco associate going back to "Hill Street," said in a recent phone interview, "Steven is very much a realist and he never tried to fool anybody with anything. What you see is what you get, and he's very honest with himself and with other people around him to a fault. But ... he's acknowledged [to me] that when you get older, the fires don't burn as strong, and the drive may not be as strong as it was. I'm experiencing the same thing."
Another of Bochco's longtime friends, James Sikking - the veteran actor who played Lt. Howard Hunter on "Hill Street" and starred in half a dozen other Bochco shows - says, "I would kick his ass if he were bitter. Come on - Steven has had extraordinary success and ... I would never let him fall into that category. You'd have to be a really shallow [jerk]... and he is not that at all - not that at all."
For the record, the guy in the big comfy chair doesn't seem bitter at all. He seems pretty happy, in fact, but he is also bluntly pragmatic. He's gotten older, and audience tastes have changed. They're not his tastes.
"I remember when I was in my 20s working at Universal and at 3:30 in the afternoon, all these big writer-producers would congregate in front of the commissary and gossip. I was the kid, and I'd pick up pearls of wisdom [while] I circled the periphery of this group and hear stuff like 'this business stinks ... the sons of bitches ... it used to be fun and it's not fun anymore blah blah blah ...' I'd think to myself, 'I'm having fun. If you're not having fun, there's the door. ...
"I always promised myself that if I ever got to be that person, I'd stop doing it," adding, "I really don't feel like banging heads with the current generation of network-runners."
Micromanaged?
Nor perhaps they with him. Bochco famously jousted with ABC during "Blue's" run over everything from language to scheduling. "Commander in Chief," an instant hit with Geena Davis before finally imploding last year, was no different.
He brawled with her over the show's direction: "She was adamant that her character, the president, had to essentially solve every problem0Apresented to her in every episode so that she was heroic." He insisted the commander in chief should be fallible.
He brawled with ABC because he demanded the network give him the room to fix the show "but inevitably the micromanaging became so distracting and so horrendously time-consuming that I began to understand why the thing had become so chaotic to begin with." (Bochco replaced creator Rod Lurie, who had reportedly fallen behind on production, forcing ABC to air repeats.)
"Oh yeah, they wanted me out. They couldn't stand me. It did a great deal of damage, probably, to my relationship with that network. It was not fun."
And, in fact, his relationship with ABC does appear to be in a deep freeze. There was one proposed show for the network, "Hollis and Rae" (about two female friends, a detective and a prosecutor, in a small Southern town) that went nowhere. He shifted his energy to the Web to produce short videos for metacafe.com called "Cafe Confidential" featuring people-on-the-street interviews. "Over There," his short-lived FX series in 2005 about the Iraq War, was critically praised, but viewers steadily dropped out and the ax fell.
He then picked up a copy of "Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice," by David Feige, about public defenders in the South Bronx. Bochco spent much of the last year helping the author pound out a ready-for-TV script.
And the major networks? He's barely given them a glance. "Arguably I've sort of outlived my generation" on TV, he says. "Everything changes."
They're younger, he's older
He then speaks of an old college professor and friend who "said to me that one of the difficult things about his job is that 'my students are always the same age but I keep getting older.' That's a lot of what's in play here. The network executives stay the same age and I keep getting older and it creates a different kind of relationship. When I was doing my stuff at NBC with Brandon [Tartikoff] and 'Hill Street,' we were contemporaries. ... When I sit down with , they're sitting in a room with someone who's old enough to be their father. My kids are their age. That's a different reality, and I'm not sure they want to sit in a room with their fathers."
He adds that the networks may think he still has his chops to produce good shows, "but they might [also] argue persuasively that their audience isn't that interested in those shows anymore." (ABC declined to comment on its fallout with Bochco.)
What's next for the man who changed television and changed it - OK, with the exception of "Capital Critters" and "Public Morals"=2 0- for the better?
Well, there's the TNT pilot, which he'll deliver in October. "We have a very good project. ... I like to say that we have an A-plus cast on a B-minus budget." And sure, if a big network calls, he's happy to talk. (None has.)
His old pal, Sikking, offers this: "He's used his money well and has more than he can possibly spend in a lifetime. He will find another way to express what he has to offer. Maybe television, but I doubt it."