‘Cop Rock’: One of TV’s Great Experiments, Finally on DVD

In 1990, Law & Order and Beverly Hills 90210 premiered; so did The Flash — you know, the first TV one, starring the current Flash’s dad, John Wesley Shipp. But for Steven Bochco — the man who brought you Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and NYPD Blue — 1990 was his year to conduct a grand experiment that crashed and burned. Cop Rock, the world’s first police drama with law enforcement officers and criminals bursting into song, came and went in 11 episodes, few of which were watched by anyone in America, even though the show aired on ABC.

Now, for the first time, Cop Rock is available to be seen, if not necessarily believed: It will be released in a three-DVD set next week. At the time, Cop Rock seemed a weird anomaly. So you’d think that now, in an era that has seen other TV-music hybrids such as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Glee, Galavant, and Smash, Cop Rock would not seem so peculiar. Yeah, you’d think that.

Truly, this was one strange show. The pilot episode begins as a gritty police drama, with cops executing a drug bust in a downtrodden Los Angeles neighborhood. But then a number of the people being arrested gather themselves, turn to the camera and begin chanting over a drum beat, “In these streets, we got the power, we got the power!” — it’s hip-hop, or as it was then still more commonly called, a rap song, and a very clumsy one. Which is really saying something in 1990, the year of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby.”

But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The theme song of Cop Rock was “Under the Gun,” a piano-based rocker written by Randy Newman, then a highly-esteemed pop singer-songwriter, pre-Toy Story and his best-known movie soundtracks. It’s a perfectly decent Newman composition, but look how the opening credits are filmed: All of the show’s stars are out of character, dressed casually and arrayed around the recording studio, nodding their heads, bopping to the beat, grinning to each other as Newman and a band that included Bochco’s longtime music producer, Mike Post, play the music. Why are all these people hanging around, acting as if they don’t have a disastrous show to put on?

In a new interview tucked into the third disc, Bochco says that his initial idea had been “to bring Broadway to a cop show,” and ABC, high on the guy who’d done groundbreaking work for NBC with Hill Street, signed on to broadcast the show, even though, Bochco admits now, “Everyone I told the concept to said it was a terrible idea” — including Randy Newman! Bochco freely admits that the ratings for the show were “an absolute disaster” right from the start: “Audiences rejected it before it even went on the air. … People were embarrassed by it, in a way.”

Is there good reason to be embarrassed? Yes. There are subplots and songs here that make you want to avert your eyes and plug up your ears. In one storyline, the mayor of L.A., played by Barbara Bosson (an excellent actor, and married to Bochco), is told she should forget about running for governor because polls have been taken and people think she’s “the ugliest woman they ever saw.” (Bosson performed her early scenes under layers of latex makeup that added jowls and wattles to her face; over a few episodes, she undergoes cosmetic surgery — the surgeon sings a tune about making people beautiful, of course — and emerges glamorous and ready for higher public office.) Another plot line involving the hunt for a rapist features female undercover cops singing the stirring couplet, “We’re gonna give him a night to remember … I think we can convince him to surrender!” (See if you can spot Sheryl Crow in the clip.)

To be sure, Cop Rock had some good Bochco touches. One subplot about a corrupt cop, played by Peter Onorati, has that bad apple murdering a suspect in the pilot episode — strong stuff that pre-dated a similar and more acclaimed storyline years later, in The Shield. And Ronny Cox, then best known from the Oscar-winning film Deliverance, gives a delightful performance as a folksy police chief who gets to ride through the streets of L.A. on a horse, strumming a guitar and yodeling a cowboy’s “Yippie-ty-yi-yay!”

Randy Newman wrote five songs for the pilot episode, including “He’s Guilty,” a clever number sung by courtroom jurors who doubled as a gospel choir. (The number won Newman an Emmy, the only award bestowed upon Cop Rock.) But Newman wasn’t involved in the rest of the show’s musical interludes, and most of the subsequent songs sound like the kind of pop drivel popular at the time from hit-single acts like Toto, Michael Bolton, Wilson Phillips, and Tesla.

For a couple of episodes, Cop Rock is a delightful disaster. Beyond that, however, it becomes a dreadful disaster. Bochco, in the DVD interview, says, “Now, you could easily binge-watch Cop Rock in two nights.” Well, yes, you could consume all the episodes in a 48-hour time period, but be careful with that word “easily” — you’d need a cast-iron stomach and ears to match to sit through moments such as a Latino “gang” singing defiantly, “We’re the local color with the Coppertone skin/Man, you treat us like we’re guilty of some terrible sin!”

The best moment in Cop Rock is its final one. When the series was canceled by ABC before filming had been completed, Bochco set up one closing number: The final scenes played out, and then Cox’s Police Chief Kendrick says to another officer, played by the great Vondie Curtis-Hall, “I can’t believe we’ve been cancelled.” “Yeah,” says Curtis-Hall, “I only got to sing one song!” Well, says, Cox, “You know what they say: It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” He presses a button on his desk, and a singing woman of large proportions is lowered from the ceiling to prove this very point. The rest of the cast, no longer in character, floods onto the set to sing one final, wailin’, rockin’ ditty. Everyone’s elated, clapping each other on the back — it’s finally over! Forever!

Four years before Cop Rock, over in Britain, Dennis Potter had presented a great genre piece with music, The Singing Detective, whose use of pop music in a dramatic context was superb. Bochco claims he never saw it until after Cop Rock, but the fact remains that music and drama could have been combined in a more artful way on television. Cop Rock failed and became a punchline, a go-to comparison whenever a TV writer wants to invoke one of the biggest bombs of all time. Now, you can watch the bomb detonate and decide for yourself.

Cop Rock: The Complete Series will be released on DVD by Shout! Factory on May 17.