Stream On: Gone too soon, part one—David Milch’s ‘Brooklyn South’
‘Brooklyn South’ was one of David Milch’s excellent shows that nevertheless didn’t make it for long on TV.
I’ve just read David Milch’s memoir, Life’s Work. Milch is the highly regarded writer behind NYPD Blue, Deadwood, and John from Cincinatti. He’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and wrote the book with the help of his family. He calls writing “a blessing,” but most of his TV series, save legendary shows NYPD Blue and Deadwood, were terminated prematurely because studio executives, and sometimes audiences, didn’t “get” them. In his book, he mentions three more than I’ve written about. The first is Brooklyn South.
/Amazon /Not streaming /YouTube /⭐7.4/10 /Pilot episode /1997 /TV14
“In part because it was on a different network [than NYPD Blue], Brooklyn South was shot on a different lot, one that happened to be across town. … By the time I would get to set, I was inevitably pissed off because I had just spent an hour in traffic, and I knew I was failing the show.” (David Milch, Life’s Work)
Brooklyn South, like NYPD Blue, was created by Milch and David Bochco, with Milch’s ex-cop friend Bill Clark (who was a technical consultant for NYPD Blue and went into screenwriting) and William Finkelstein, who has worked with Dick Wolf (Law and Order) and Bochco. NYPD Blue was still on the air (and would be until 2005), and Milch’s vision for Brooklyn South was that it be a complement to NYPD Blue, but about uniformed officers instead of detectives. It doesn’t disappoint—me, anyway.
The focus for Brooklyn South is the 74th Precinct in Brooklyn (as it was in East New York). Frank Donovan (Jon Tenney, The Closer/Major Crimes) is the patrol sergeant who presides every day over the morning shift assignments he gives to the uniformed officers. We learn that Donovan is also an informant for the hated Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB), and secretly reports to Lt. Stan Jonas (James B. Sikking, Hill Street Blues, the first TV series that Milch wrote for), who, early in the series, transfers from the IAB to become precinct captain. Jack Lowery (Titus Welliver, Bosch, Deadwood) is a tough young street cop coping with personal demons; Richard Santoro (Gary Basaraba) is the station's desk sergeant, a police veteran who had seen it all and is the voice of reason in the station house, keeping things calm.
The series was scheduled opposite ABC's Monday Night Football and NBC's Dateline Monday, and struggled in the ratings, averaging 10.5 million viewers and ranking 74th for the season.
In Bochco’s autobiography, Truth is a Total Defense, he says personal issues kept him also from inputting as much as usual into this show's production, and that this contributed to weak scripts after the first few episodes (what’s weak to Bochco is alright to me). He then took more control in the later episodes and ratings started to perk up, but CBS chairman Les Moonves cancelled the show anyway, a decision Bochco and Milch adamantly disagreed with, a season after extreme tinkering by CBS canceled Bochco’s bilious comedy Public Morals (on which Milch, alas!, was a creative consultant) after one episode.
Milch writes, in Life’s Work, “When I left NYPD Blue, I said to my agent, ‘Okay, go get me a deal. I’ll work for anybody but Les Moonves.’ The experience with him on Brooklyn South—I didn’t love that. He seemed to me to think he was the only one who understood how the world worked, and he didn’t. He also had an active disdain for artistic ambition—treated it as a self-delusion, which maybe it is, but the forced ironic pose, I can’t work like that.” (Les Moonves turned out to be a creep after all, by the way.)
Brooklyn South’s twenty-two episodes (which do wrap up satisfyingly) are not streaming currently; they are on DVD, and have been uploaded to YouTube.
Sources include Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED).
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.