NYPD Blue ends

[charlie clown]

only a short article but a good un. This has probably been consistently my favourite show over the last ten years or so.

 

 

Article

 

 

"NYPD Blue is over. The last-ever episode has been broadcast and we will have to learn to manage without our weekly fix from the 15th precinct.

 

At the start, it was meant to be David Caruso's show. He was the good-looking lead, and the smuggest actor in the thespian firmament (at least until William Petersen as CSI's Gil Grissom came along and the entire scale had to be reset), but his character was inexplicably popular with viewers. Fortunately, this encouraged him to leave for an imagined stellar career in Hollywood.

 

From then on, the show cohered gradually but increasingly gratefully around Dennis Franz as Andy Sipowicz. Sipowicz was an old-school cop - permanently enraged by the lowlife around him, dogged, honest, alcoholic, racist, loyal, divorced, hooker-frequenting, hardworking and a bad father. Franz is an actor who can convey all that Andy is and more by a single twitch of his world-weary face. Once the writers realised this, everything gravitated towards him. They gave the potato-faced old bigot a Hispanic partner, the coolly intelligent and graceful Bobby Simone, and everyone stood back and watched him wrestle with this sudden shattering of a world view. They gave him Sylvia, a woman who saw his good heart and made him fall in love, and it was really rather beautiful. They reconciled him with his son, Andy Jr, and when he - and later Simone, in an episode that was rightly lauded at the time as one of the greatest hours of television ever made - died, Franz gave performances that told all that anyone has ever known about grief.

 

Over the years, he and they gave us the subtle, almost imperceptible evolution of Andy from self-destructive, alcoholic bigot into - well, actually, not the perfect hero, nor anything like. Just into a better man. It was a profoundly realistic, almost real-time redemption, of the kind that can only be offered by this kind of vanishingly rare long-term successful series, and it ended with Sipowicz sitting quietly in his office, finally in charge of the 15th squad. We should all mourn the passing."

[Tosh]

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