Even in Horrendous Failure, Steven Bochco Succeeded—And Cop Rock Is Proof

Ask a TV fanatic to name the most laughable failure in broadcast history, and chances are they’ll cite Cop Rock. The musical police drama made it a mere 11 episodes before ABC canned the series in 1990, and is still remembered as a spectacular misfire—even by those who never caught its original run.

But in an age when TV musicals have made a comeback—thanks to success stories like Glee, Empire, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,—it’s worth re-examining Cop Rock with gentler eyes. Its creator, the prolific, hallowed producer Steven Bochco, was a visionary who changed serial dramas with series like Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. Bochco died Sunday following an extended battle with leukemia, and his legacy is as formidable as it is colorful; he was known for standing by his artistic vision and refusing to bow to network anxieties.

Sometimes, as with NYPD Blue, this strategy worked; other times, it begat Cop Rock. But as Bochco noted in a 2016 interview with the A.V. Club, the series sprang from a 10-series deal with ABC—and “if you have the guarantee of getting that many shows on the air and you don’t do something bold and adventurous and experimental, then shame on you.”

To be clear, more recent TV musicals have largely felt more polished than Cop Rock did—at least, where the music is concerned. Glee, Smash, and Empire all focus or focused focused on people whose lives organically revolve around music, which removes some of the awkwardness inherent to a premise in which people are bursting into song. But Bochco enjoyed pushing the boundaries of what TV could do; Hill Street Blues, an experimentally gritty cop drama, was among the lowest-rated series NBC ever renewed before it became a hit, as the Los Angeles Times noted in its own post-mortem tribute to Bochco. As the prolific producer told the paper four years ago, “It was messy, barely controlled chaos. We were really inventing it as we went along. There has never been anything like it before in terms of size and sloppiness. Words were tumbling out in the background, the frame was teeming with characters.”

Hill Street Blues went on to air for seven successful seasons, racking up dozens of Emmys along the way. It became a guiding light for serial dramas, which followed its example and became more and more serialized over time. In an interview for the book Writing the TV Drama Series: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV, Bochco explained, “When you end up creating a show with seven, eight, nine characters—ask yourself, how can you appropriately dramatize that many characters within the framework of an hour television show? And the answer is that you can’t. So you say, O.K., what we have to do is spill over the sides of our form and start telling multi-plot, more serial kinds of stories.”

After Hill Street Blues came another smash TV hit: NYPD Blue. But it’s worth noting, as the Times does, that Bochco faced no small amount of network anxiety when it came to the drama that would run for 12 seasons. Even as multiple ABC affiliate stations vowed not to air the series premiere, Bochco refused to make any edits. Evidently, his bet paid off—putting Bochco’s stamp on what had become a stagnant genre of procedural television once more. And just last November, in an amusing wrinkle of fate, ABC announced that it’s cooking up a new musical crime drama that sure sounds like Cop Rock—although sources have stressed that this series is not about singing cops.

One person who never regretted Cop Rock for a second? Bochco himself. Speaking with the A.V. Club, the producer said he was never embarrassed by the series—which was a good thing, since no one would ever let him forget it. And his reasoning is worth remembering: “You know, if you’re a baseball player and you get a base hit three times out of 10, and you do that for 20 years, you’re going to be in the Hall of Fame, but you’re still gonna strike out sometimes. That’s inevitable. But at least I went down swinging!”

22 Movies and TV Shows That Will Save Us in 2018