Sue, Sue! Bang, Bang!

By Richard Zoglin

If television cops of the 1980s have changed from those of the '70s, the credit must go largely to two men. One of them, Steven Bochco, was the co- creator (with Michael Kozoll) of Hill Street Blues, the police drama that brought the genre a gritty new look, bustling narratives and a recognition that police officers are adults, not cartoon heroes. The other, Michael Mann, gave the formula another new twist a few seasons later with Miami Vice, which used flashy visuals and a thumping rock sound track to transform familiar cops-and-robbers tales into moody morality plays.

Crusading professionals are out in force on TV screens again this fall, but most seem untouched by the winds of change. CBS's Kay O'Brien, about a female surgeon, is Dr. Kildare crossed with Cagney & Lacey. In ABC's Jack and Mike, a newspaper columnist rushes to help folks in trouble while trying to keep her marriage afloat, a yuppie update of Hart to Hart. In CBS's Downtown, a tough cop gets crime-fighting help from four oddball parolees, a sort of B-Team. In addition to the routine fare, however, Bochco and Mann are introducing second- generation shows of their own. If neither is as groundbreaking as its predecessor, both exhibit a quality rare in prime time: they are unmistakable products of their creators, not of the TV assembly line.

Bochco's career has stumbled since the initial success of Hill Street Blues. His much touted 1983 series about a minor- league baseball team, Bay City Blues, was canceled after a few low-rated weeks. In March 1985 he was fired from Hill Street, reportedly after disputes with his bosses at MTM Enterprises about cost overruns. Nevertheless, NBC is giving his new series, L.A. Law, a double-barreled send-off. The two-hour pilot episode premiering this week will have an unusual encore presentation in the Saturday Night Live time period two weeks later.

L.A. Law, which revolves around the doings at a high-powered Los Angeles law firm, exhibits most of Bochco's now familiar trademarks: a large "ensemble cast"; multiple, overlapping plots; a rounded look at its characters' personal and professional lives; and a well-calculated mix of drama and comedy. Stylistically, however, the show is more conventional than Hill Street. The long camera takes inside the station house, with characters streaming in and out of the frame, have been replaced by more routine TV close-ups.

It is in content that L.A. Law stakes its claim to originality. Lawyers on TV have traditionally been either courtroom sleuths (Perry Mason) or crusading Clarence Darrows (The Defenders). L.A. Law moves the profession into the litigious real world by focusing on a big-city firm that handles everything from divorces to corporate mergers, and lawyers who spend as much time playing office politics as figuring out how to crack a key prosecution witness. In the series opener, an oily and aggressive divorce attorney (Corbin Bernsen) turns a friendly marital breakup into a screaming catfight. An idealistic lawyer (Jill Eikenberry) and her young assistant (Michele Greene) try to get redress for a woman denied medical coverage by her insurance company. Another member of the firm (Harry Hamlin) is forced to defend the son of a rich client against charges of participating in a gang rape. Meanwhile, the firm considers hiring a fiery Hispanic public defender (Jimmy Smits), and spurts of Bochco- esque black humor emerge in a subplot about the sudden death of one of the firm's partners. (At his funeral, a secretary reveals herself to be a transsexual who was the dead man's lover.)

The cast is appealing -- particularly Hamlin, Eikenberry and Richard Dysart as the firm's fatherly senior partner -- and Bochco has become TV's most expert juggler of plots and characters. Yet the first episode of L.A. Law is considerably less daring than advertised. The show's fashionable cynicism about lawyers is tempered by a surfeit of sanctimoniousness. For every cold- blooded attorney obsessed with money and position, there is a principled white knight who speaks up for integrity. The overwrought dialogue makes the dichotomy clear. "We are talking about a woman who could die, and all he can see are dollar signs!" says Eikenberry after an encounter with one of the firm's more mercenary partners. The rich kid accused of rape is intolerably smug about his crime: "Did you talk to my father yet? For a thousand bucks, she'll fold like a deck chair." The rape victim, played by Alfre Woodard, is not only poor and black but dying of leukemia as well; the show's idea of a hard-hitting attack on lawyers is to have her subjected to a ruthless cross- examination on the witness stand. Shadings may develop as the series progresses, but for now L.A. Law's gavel too often hits like a sledgehammer.

Bochco's style is essentially an '80s update of the message-heavy '50s TV dramaturgy of Rod Serling and Reginald Rose. Michael Mann, by contrast, comes from the postverbal, MTV-influenced school of style over substance. Even so, the new NBC series for which he serves as executive producer, Crime Story, is more challenging and morally complex than L.A. Law. Lieut. Mike Torello, part of a special Chicago major-crimes unit, is an ambiguous hero who takes reluctant witnesses into dark alleys for "questioning," knocks his wife around in a fit of jealousy, and admits to having lied to make sure a hood goes to trial. Yet he is a man imbued with righteous passion. "I'm wherever | you go," he warns a Mob boss who has been strong-arming some friends, "and if anything else happens to the O'Donnells, I'll be the last thing you ever see." As played by Dennis Farina, who co-starred in Mann's recent theatrical film Manhunter, Torello is the least glamorous and most riveting protagonist of the TV season.

Crime Story, co-written by ex-Chicago Detective Chuck Adamson and supposedly based on his own experiences, will follow three characters -- the police lieutenant, a rising young mobster (Anthony Denison) and a lawyer (Stephen Lang) -- over a period of nearly two decades. The two-hour premiere, set in 1962, is in many ways a throwback. The cops wear black trench coats and fedoras and wield their pistols with one hand, cowboy-style, rather than by Hill Street's two-handed method. The Mob characters seem to predate The Godfather, and nobody has heard of drugs. Most of the crimes are, quaintly, jewelry heists.

But the show has a grim, pounding energy, a bracing sound track that mixes Todd Rundgren with early rock (Del Shannon has rerecorded his hit Runaway for the show's theme) and an impeccable cast that seems to have emerged from the street, not a Hollywood casting call. Mann and Director Abel Ferrara indulge in few of the stylistic flourishes of Miami Vice but revel in the shadowy bars and gleaming tail fins of their seedy milieu.

Crime Story is the most realistic TV cop show in years, yet the emotions reach almost baroque heights. Looking over the scene of a partner's murder, Torello thrusts his fist through a phone-booth window and sinks into tears. A fatally injured young hood, restrained by a respirator, flails about on his hospital bed in panic and rage. The pilot has enough violence to ignite a season's worth of protests. Yet nothing seems exploitative. In a bravura opening, a wild chase ends with a shoot-out at the house of an anonymous family. After the carnage is over, Torello notices a pair of children peering curiously from inside a bedroom. He walks over to them and ends the scene with a quiet punctuation mark, "Get down from the window." Cop shows may not have changed much after all, but they do not get any better than this.