Divorce, Bochco-Style

By Richard Zoglin

Pity the poor TV innovator; his work is never done. Steven Bochco changed the course of network TV in the early '80s with his breakthrough cop show Hill Street Blues. He opened new areas of provocative subject matter a few years later with his yuppie drama L.A. Law. Those hits were enough to convince ABC that Bochco was worth a long-term gamble: in 1987 the network signed him to a contract worth $50 million, to develop 10 series during the next decade. Then Bochco had to face a really tricky problem: how to top himself.

For his first show under the new ABC deal, Doogie Howser, M.D., Bochco tried a gimmick: a comedy about a 16-year-old genius with a medical degree. Then he turned experimental, adding musical numbers to a police drama and coming up with Cop Rock. The show failed with audiences, probably because Bochco did part of his job too well: the gritty cop scenes were so compelling that the musical numbers (which rarely measured up) seemed like rude interruptions.

Now Bochco has retrenched. Civil Wars, his latest drama series, takes him back into comfortable L.A. Law territory. Mariel Hemingway and Peter Onorati (a survivor of Cop Rock) play New York City lawyers who team up to handle divorce work. The Bochco trademarks are all here: three or four story lines interwoven through the hour, a mix of social comment and sophomoric black humor, and a slick, upscale look. (Even the office secretary dresses like a Vogue model.)

But Civil Wars is bleaker and more brutal than anything Bochco has done before: an unrelenting parade of vengeful spouses, greed, infidelity, callousness and other mental cruelties. "You're bitter, you're needy, and you're gonna poison whatever and whoever you come in contact with!" shouts a husband at the wife he wants to leave because she has gained too much weight. (She actually looks pretty good.) A rich couple bickers over custody of sterling silver soup tureens and antique snuffboxes, until a stenographer -- who is struggling to pay her son's medical bills -- blows up: "You have no idea what it's like to live in this city on $26,000 a year!"

The show's dark tone has apparently given ABC executives some nervous moments. They reportedly asked Bochco to redo the first episode, adding some comic relief; it now contains a subplot about a woman seeking a divorce because her husband thinks he's Elvis. Other problems remain. Civil Wars has too little of interest going on outside the courtroom (no romance so far between Hemingway and Onorati), and its "lighthearted" moments are rather distasteful. One running story involves Hemingway's law partner (Alan Rosenberg), who has a nervous breakdown in the first show and returns later to do kooky things like barbecuing hamburgers in the office.

But Bochco may be smarter than ABC thinks. Civil Wars is a canny compendium of every relationship issue the '90s has to offer. And it feeds one of TV's most enduring myths: that the cold legal system has a human face. The moral high ground is always clearly marked -- for the viewer, if not always for the judge. Lawyers, moreover, are warm, understanding and passionately devoted to their clients. Onorati, after negotiating a settlement for the "overweight" wife, accompanies her to her 20th-year college reunion. Hemingway pleads with one client, the wife of a sleazy rock musician, not to accept her husband's invitation for coffee. When the woman objects, Hemingway chides her like a protective sorority sister: "Hey, this is your lawyer talking."