Hill Street Blues on Happy Juice

By Richard Zoglin

Frustrated at doing police work by the book, detective Wade Preston likes to hark back to the cops he idolizes: "Baretta, Starsky and Hutch, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin -- those guys had fun!" His partner replies impatiently, "Those are TV cops. They're not real." Whines the TV junkie: "Who says everything has to be real?"

Just so. Very little in Bakersfield P.D. qualifies as real, at least by TV's usual standards. In the pixilated police department where this sitcom is set, the captain is a nervous Nellie who can't make a decision without the approval of his protective aide-de-camp. One sentimental cop causes a ruckus when he takes to bestowing kisses on his partner. A crazed gunman barricades himself inside a building and holds off a SWAT team but seems at a loss to explain why. "I want you to send somebody in," he finally calls out, "to help me think of my demands." Even odder, all of this doesn't blast away at viewers with the firepower of a typical sitcom Uzi; devoid of a laugh track, it floats along like an errant Wiffle ball.

Bakersfield P.D. is the best-kept secret of the new season. To find the show on the weekly Nielsen chart, one practically has to turn the newspaper upside down: for the season to date, the Fox show ranks 99th out of a possible 101. Despite the bleak numbers, Fox programmers have renewed the show for the entire season -- evidence of either a sorry lack of replacements on the bench or a heartening faith in what is easily the best new comedy of the season.

Executive producer Larry Levin, a former writer for It's Garry Shandling's Show and creator of last season's cop spoof Arresting Behavior, concedes that even in the best circumstances, Bakersfield P.D. is unlikely to become a Top 10 hit. "I'm asking viewers to look sideways at stuff instead of dead-on, and it throws most people," he says. "My feet are firmly planted in sand. Nothing is black and white to me."

Certainly not the sensitive subject of black-and-white relations. Bakersfield P.D. focuses on Paul Gigante (Giancarlo Esposito), a black police detective newly transplanted from Washington. His race makes him a curiosity in Bakersfield's white-bread station house, and his new colleagues are naive enough to say what's on their mind. His TV-obsessed partner (Ron Eldard) admits to feeling "a little gypped" that the first black man he has worked with is so lacking in flash. In a sting operation to nab a call-girl ring, Gigante is picked to go undercover as a pimp. He bristles, saying, "I don't see why the color of my skin automatically makes me a prime candidate to portray a pimp." (The captain, bristling back, says he'll get someone else for the job: "We've got plenty of guys in this precinct who are very much at home around prostitutes.") Rarely has TV portrayed casual racial stereotyping with as much humor or human understanding. Cop-show stereotypes come in for even more satire. The police in this California backwater are a far cry from the cool, macho professionals who have populated TV dramas from Kojak to NYPD Blue. Mostly they are wimpy, neurotic, overemotional misfits, more obsessed with interpersonal trivia than the demands of police work. Not that the police work is very demanding. The morning roll call in Bakersfield P.D. is like Hill Street Blues on happy juice: "We've got two officers down and another squad car in the shop," announces the gruff sergeant (Brian Doyle-Murray). "Try and remember that new speed bump by the junior high."

Gigante is the island of professionalism in this sea of looniness -- dumbfounded by the nuts around him but eager to be accepted by them. Invited for the first time to join their weekly poker game, he innocently ups the stakes, then proceeds to clean everybody out. "This is more about bonding than poker, isn't it?" he asks. Precisely: the next day, he's ostracized like Fast Eddie Felson at the neighborhood pool hall. One has to go back to The Andy Griffith Show to find a more astute, affectionate satire of small-town provincialism.

Does Bakersfield P.D. have a future? The show is probably too gentle and unassertive to inspire the sort of grass-roots campaign that saved or extended shows like Brooklyn Bridge and Cagney & Lacey. Levin thinks the subject matter makes it a tough sell. "Nobody wants to see ineffective cops," he theorizes. "In the days of Car 54, Where Are You? people didn't have to lock their doors or their car. Today there's violence and fear and crime everywhere, and nobody wants to see a cop who can't make a decision." Maybe not, but who says every show has to be real?

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/ Los Angeles