First up, apologies for this being so late, but I've been really up 
against it at work the last few weeks. In fact, the prospects of my 
finishing the season review looked so bleak that I actually recruited 
James Lloyd Hill, my evil twin, to help me finish it. I won't say which 
comments were written by him and which by me. You'll have to figure it 
out. :)

Some random thoughts on the close of the fourth season of NYPD Blue, 
by Alan Lloyd Sepinhill:

1)David Milch is overworked.

  On the top of his game, there's probably no better writer of dramatic 
series television (though Paul Haggis & Tom Fontana could both give him a 
run for his money). Heck, sometimes he's great even when he's under great 
duress; most everyone's pick for best season four episode, "Is Paris 
Burning?" was apparently written on the fly by Milch in between takes of 
the pilot for "Brooklyn South" (which, by the way, is excellent, although 
in some ways it's so much like NYPD Blue that it may be overkill). 

  With a writing and/or story credit in 14 of this season's 22 episodes as
well as his producer's position, Milch continues to keep a firm hand on
the tiller.  For better or worse, Blue is _his_ show and the storylines go
where _he_ decides.  As a result, a great deal of the blame for many of
the less-than-stellar episodes and arcs of the season just past can be laid
at his feet.

  With few exceptions (Bobby and Henry come to mind), long-term stories 
either ended abruptly (James as union delegate), ended badly (Diane and 
Jimmy Liery) or just plain made people's skin crawl (Medavoy and Abby). 
And a lot of other things went wrong, which we'll get into below. Near 
the end of the season, in addition to heavily rewriting every single Blue 
script, he was also working on the Brooklyn South and Total Security 
pilots, as well as, reportedly, a movie. Something has to give. 

2)Okay, so maybe Andy didn't shoot Salvo.

  After having watched the season finale a few more times, reread a lot 
of the postings to alt.tv.nypd-blue, and exchanging e-mail with a lot of 
fans, I'm beginning to waver more than a little on my earlier, absolute 
stance about Andy being the shooter. 
  The biggest reason for my doubts is the whole issue of Janice Licalsi, 
who, for those of you who started watching after season one, was The 
Other Guy's main squeeze. In the second episode, she murdered in cold 
blood a mafia don who was trying to blackmail her into killing Kelly. 
  Now, I know the show's not above repeating itself -- in fact, that's 
usually its cardinal sin -- so that's not why I'm suddenly down on the 
idea of Andy as avenging assassin. Rather, from reading "True Blue," the 
book that Milch and co-producer Bill Clark (the retired cop who comes up 
with all the stories), I remember that the reason Janice got written off 
the show was because Clark couldn't stomach the idea of a murderer -- 
even one who killed for noble reasons -- hanging around on the force and, 
therefore, in the cast. And eventually, Clark converted Milch over to his 
side. For all the legal, oral and ethical lines that our heroes cross, 
killing in cold blood (as opposed to the myriad number of times Bobby has 
capped guys in self-defense) is the one thing that is verboten.
  And that's why I'm starting to have a hard time seeing Andy, the show's 
heart and soul hero, killing Salvo.
  If it wasn't Andy, that means the shooter could've been just about 
anyone, from Martens to Agent Kriegel to the ghost of Jimmy Liery. 
Considering Milch's recent job stress (see above), I wouldn't be 
surprised if he just decided, "Ah, hell with it, I'll write a 
cliffhanger and figure out how to solve it after I'm rested." So I 
wouldn't spend too much time doing frame-by-frame analyses of the 
shooting incident if I were you, folks.
  Of course, if I'm right about this new theory, that means I owe a certain 
someone on Usenet a bottle of Stoli. This is why I never gamble. :)

3)Jill Kirkendall is cool

  About the best thing to come out of this season has been the 
introduction of Andrea Thompson as Jill Kirkendall. In a year that was 
particularly unkind to the women -- within a three week span, Diane 
admitted to being molested, Gina got her face slashed, and Geri was 
revealed to be an S&M freak -- Jill stood out as the series' first real 
capable, independent female character. The closest the show has come 
before was with Sharon LaSalle, a detective who was at the One-Five for a 
few episodes in season one, but she was essentially written as John Kelly 
with breasts. 
  Kirkendall, on the other hand, has been a lot of fun to watch in her 
(too) few appearances so far. She more than holds her own as a detective 
-- she's just about the only one in the squad who doesn't seem 
intimidated by the skill/success of Sipowicz & Simone -- has a quirky 
sense of humor, and, aside from a brief flirtation with Simone, which I 
still say could be interpreted as two co-workers going out and being 
friendly, has not been treated as a sex object like virtually all the 
other attractive women who've strolled through the One-Five's doors.
To be perfectly honest, considering the way a lot of the supporting cast 
gets written these days, I'd be more than content to watch a show that 
starred only Franz, Smits, McDaniel and Thompson.

4)Sharon Lawrence is definitely missed. 

  Not so much because I miss Sylvia, considering the dramatic lobotomy the 
character got after the wedding, but because Andy was very much cut 
adrift this year. 
  We can see a mistake made by the men behind the curtain.  Andy's redemption
from unrepentant racist, sexist alcoholic has largely been due to Sylvia.
With the exemption of the occasional men's room talk with Simone, his
personal growth has been displayed through conversations with Sylvia that
we the audience have been privileged to witness.  To justify the number of
these conversations, Andy's relationship with Sylvia was made out to be a
major, if not THE major, factor in his life.  With Lawrence now gone, the
writers find themselves without an effective way of revealing the man's
thoughts.  Having established that soul-baring is something he does
only with his wife, it now rings false to have him "sharing" with anyone
who'll listen.
  We can hope that "Fired Up" gets canceled in short order next season 
and Lawrence returns to the fold until a show more deserving of
her talents comes along.  In the interim, the writers should think of a
way out of the corner into which they are currently painted. At the very 
least, some more time should be spent on Andy's moonlighting career. The 
show got a lot of good mileage in the early days when the Other Guy 
worked night jobs, and so long as Lawrence is playing for laughs on 
Must-She TV, Franz needs something to do besides slap around perps and 
make pithy comments.
  Even if Lawrence continues to appear only sporadically, if at all, the
writers can't allow themselves to become sloppy re: Sylvia.  Considerable
time and effort was expended early in the season establishing that Sylvia
was going to become a stay-at-home mother to baby Theo...but as the
Lawrence-free weeks stretched on and a token mention of her existence
became necessary, riding DA Cohen claimed to have volunteered to take a
case off her hands.  Consistency is crucial.

5)Jimmy Smits can be a scary, scary man. 

  So I get back from the gym a few nights ago around 10:40, flip on the TV, 
and to my delight, it's a repeat of "Yes Sir, That's My Baby," which not 
only introduced Kirkendall, but featured Bobby's interrogation of Henry 
Coffield about the murder in his apartment building. I missed most of the 
Kirkendall stuff, but managed to catch that final Bobby/Henry scene, and 
let me tell you, when Simone hurls Henry into the cage, throws down his 
jacket and snarls, "I am done playing with you," I got a major case of 
the creepy-crawlies. 
  As much of a good guy as Smits seems to be in real life, and as much as 
Simone is supposed to be the good cop to Sipowicz's bad cop, I think 
Bobby comes alive the most whenever he's letting his dark side come out 
and howl. That was true in the Henry arc and it was true in the season's 
final episodes when Bobby blew his stack over the screwing he was 
receiving from the FBI and IAB. Regardless of the "Who shot Salvo?" 
resolution, I want to see Bobby being nasty more often next year, even if 
it's just an on-the-job thing (can't alienate all of the folks who tune 
in for Smits the sex symbol).   

6)Greg, James, and Diane need better press agents, but the Lieu is alright

  This wasn't a good year to be a supporting castmember unless your name 
was James McDaniel. Let's take it one by one:

  MEDAVOY: Oy vey. Where to begin? Medavoy wins the Adrienne Lesniak 
Commemorative Ruined Character Award for the 96-97 season. Gordon Clapp 
is a terrific actor and a really nice guy, but Medavoy just needs to be 
put out of his misery once and for all. With Donna gone from the show 
once and for all, were were treated (or subjected, as the case may be) to 
an entire season of Medavoy's unbridled wackiness. First, there was the 
diet competition, a good idea in theory if it had been used as a kind of 
running gag where every few episodes Greg and Andy would trade a quip or 
two about their weight on the way to a crime scene. Instead, it devolved 
into lengthy episode-by-episode subplots of Medavoy at his most 
unwittingly obnoxious. At least that one got dropped by the wayside about 
a third of the way through the year (unless you count the peanut butter 
binging as part of it, which I don't). We weren't nearly as lucky when it 
came to the hijinks involving Medavoy the Social Moron and His Wacky 
Lesbian Galpals. I've said enough about this already, so let me just 
recap quickly: by making Medavoy such a complete cartoon in most of the 
stories, it made it impossible to give a damn whenever he was put into a 
really serious situation. The whole issue of Greg trying to deal with the 
department's sanctioned violence in general and Andy the suspect beater's 
heroic status in particular was a great one, but sandwiched as it was in 
between the ongoing atrocity that was the artificial insemination story, 
it was hard to care at all. (An aside: it is possible to have a character 
be used for both comic relief and dramatic purposes, as Milch and Bochco 
proved with J.D. LaRue on Hill Street Blues, but they pushed Medavoy too 
far this year until he became completely non-credible as a character and 
as a cop.)

  MARTINEZ: Alas, poor James. I knew him, Horatio. Seriously, when was 
the last time that James did *anything* of note this year? When Gina got 
her face slashed? What was that, back in January? The season started out 
with promise for the most ignored member of the cast, as James decided to 
run against Vince Gotelli for union delegate. As David Milch explained it 
to a group of reporters in the summer, "We're going to put him in a lot 
of situations where he's trying to help out cops in trouble." Sounds 
good, right? Well, the prospect of the squeaky clean (almost to a fault, 
from a charisma standpoint) James getting entangled with corrupt cops 
never materialized. Instead, we got a few episodes of silliness involving 
the campaign between James and Vince, including cannolis and lame coffee 
mugs. Once that was out of the way, James spent an amusing but 
unremarkable episode trying to mediate a dispute involving a cop who was 
seemingly a bigamist. And after that, nothing. 
  Sure, he spent some time throughout the year first wooing and then 
looking out for Gina, but, in the opinion of at least this viewer, it was 
a pretty paint-by-numbers romance, even by Blue standards: 1)Introduce 
attractive female, 2)Rapidly pair off said female with male regular, 
3)Insert frequent ho-hum domestic scenes of the happy couple, 4)If 
necessary, put female in situation that causes male to become 
overprotective. Nothing too exciting. 
  
  THE MOUSE: No matter how accurately or sensitively portrayed, an 
unending succession of movies-of-the-week have made the recovery of 
childhood horror (especially incestuous molestation) a trite cliche.  
There is no way to get around that.  Blue gets high marks for trying, but 
the entire molestation thread was manipulative and overwrought.  Adding 
to the insult was the fact that a promising storyline (and a great 
character in Jimmy Liery) was revealed to be nothing more than the 
trigger to awaken Diane's memories of her past.  Once she had been 
(maybe) drugged and raped, she could remember the past.  The Jimmy arc?  
Oh, Jimmy's dead and the undercover assignment is over.  See you next 
week, same Blue time, same Blue channel.  Very badly handled, and in a 
season where Diane's roles were largely (a) get naked with Simone, and 
(b) go on call with Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, it's a crime to see Kim 
Delaney's best opportunity reduced to the kind of banal and overdone plot 
that daytime dramas have tackled on a weekly basis since 1975.

  THE LIEU: If I'm James McDaniel looking back over this past season, I 
am, for the most part, a happy man. Lt. Fancy got the most exposure he's 
had since at least the first season, if not ever, with three episodes 
having heavy-duty Fancy stories, a few others with well-written comic 
subplots, and a host of others that, if not putting him front and 
center, at least made him visible and vocal throughout. And contrary to 
the opinions of some (and that includes one of this piece's co-authors), not 
all of his exposure was race related. Sure, he was getting in Andy's face 
about Kwasi during "Where's 'Swaldo?" and trying to elevate the 
consciousness of Officer Szymanski in "Taillights' Last Gleaming" and 
"Bad Rap." But he was also trying to rescue his former foster child in 
"Unembraceable You," reluctantly selling Amyway products for his wife in 
"I Love Lucy," acting as watchdog for Diane during the Liery arc, and 
trying to salvage the careers of Simone and Vince Gotelli in "Is Paris 
Burning?" to name just a few episodes. This is the way the guy with third 
billing should be utilized. Let's hope they keep it up next year.

7)If a PAA speaks, and no one's there to hear her, does she make a sound?

  This is something I've said a couple of times in followups to other 
people's Usenet posts, so I'll make it brief and not mention it again: I 
don't mind that Gina never says anything. 
  She is not a detective. She is not an attorney. She is not actively 
involved in the criminal justice system, unless you count filing the 61 
reports as "active." She is the squad receptionist, and that's not a job 
that should entail a lot of subplots on a show about detectives. About 
the only way to feature her more would be to do more stories about her 
relationship with James, and if I had to choose between additional 
romantic subplots or having Lourdes Benedicto reduced to saying the 
occasional "this person wants to see you, Detective," I'll take the 
latter everytime. But maybe that's just me. 

8)  Isn't that--  And didn't we see--

  Blue has long had a tradition of recycling plots.  While the real world
almost certainly has a degree of repetition to it (for example, drunken
or stoned men beat their girlfriends to death often enough that every NY
cop has probably seen twenty or thirty before he gets his five-year pin),
it doesn't make for good drama, because after a while, one episode begins
to look like another.  Given that characters can't change much or the
audience will fidget, the plots and the lines are what will distinguish one
episode from another.  Once people begin to describe an episode as "just
like the one a year or so ago where they investigate a murder, only last
night the vic was Hungarian instead of Polish" you're in danger of losing
the audience.
  Hard on the heels of recycled plots is recycled actors.  While not the
worst offender on television today (Law & Order reigns undisputed in that
category), it still jars the memory to see last year's heroin addict as this
year's investigative reporter.  When there's a good chance we'll see him
again as next year's defense attorney, the suspension of belief is made
nearly impossible.  I can appreciate the desire that producers have to work
again with a good actor who conducts himself professionally but on
episodic television, that's a indulgence that short-changes the audience.

9)  All is not lost.

  The show took a downward turn this season.  Recycled plots, recycled
actors, and some new stories that would have been more appropriate on
"Three's Company" or "The Young and the Restless" left a sour taste in
the mouth.  However, episodes like "Taillight's Last Gleaming," "Upstairs, 
Downstairs," "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby", and "Is Paris Burning?" showed 
that the production staff can still deliver knockout episodes.  This gets 
back to topic 1, that David Milch is overworked.  We can hope that once 
"Brooklyn South" is launched, Milch either has little to do with it or 
relinquishes his close control over Blue. Maybe he can clone himself. 

Alan Sepinwall * e-mail: sepinwal@force.stwing.upenn.edu
Homepage: http://www.stwing.upenn.edu/~sepinwal/
NYPD Blue page: http://www.stwing.upenn.edu/~sepinwal/nypd.html 

(NON) RANDOM QUOTE:

"That's Jesus Christ, Dad. Congratulations on pissing off Jesus."
	-Michael DeLuise, "NYPD Blue"