PRPG:

Steven Bochco’s TV Bombs

April 3, 2018

There are only a few TV producers and TV show creators whose names are as famous as TV stars—people like Norman Lear, Garry Marshall, Shonda Rimes, and Steven Bochco, who died this month at age 74. 

Steven Bochco was a TV innovator who developed and produced classic, groundbreaking shows like the gritty and harrowing police dramas Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, the legal drama L.A. Law, and even Doogie Howser, M.D., one of the first laugh-track free sitcoms. But innovators have to take risks—like Bochco did when he took a shot with some weird high concept shows…that were quickly canceled.

Cop Rock

Nobody could make a more crime drama than Bochco, which means the police, crime, and courtroom scenes in the 1990-91 series Cop Rock were quite well done. However, Cop Rock was also a weekly musical series with Broadway-style showstopping song-and-dance numbers. This meant that every so often, the searing drama could screech to a halt so the cops, criminals, and judges could sing an original song written by Randy Newman. Cop Rock was canceled after 11 episodes.

Turnabout 

Bochco wrote the pilot for this 1979 show, which was based on the 1931 novel Turnabout. It’s sort of like if Freaky Friday if it were a sitcom about a married couple and also the body-switching never ended. A couple buy a cursed magic statue, which makes their spirits switch bodies. Only seven episodes aired before it disappeared.

The Gemini Man

One of Bochco’s first series was this 1976 science-fiction series akin to The Incredible Hulk or The Six Million Dollar Man. It’s about a secret agent who gets injured in a diving accident…and realizes he now has the power of invisibility. There are some caveats, however: He can only go invisible for 15 minutes a day (or he’ll die), and he turns the power on and off with a special watch. The Gemini Man permanently went invisible (meaning it was canceled) after six episodes.

Capitol Critters

When Fox’s The Simpsons became the first successful primetime cartoon in decades in the early ‘90s, the other networks wanted in. In 1992, ABC said yes to Bochco’s Capitol Critters. Set in Washington, D.C., it satirized human politics by showing the shady deals brokered by the literal rats, mice, and vermin politicians who lived in and ran Washington, D.C.’s sewers. Capitol Critters lasted just 13 episodes.

NYPD 2069

NYPD Blue wasn’t the only NYPD series Bochco worked on. In 2004, he created a series (and filmed an unsold pilot for) this futuristic series about a cop named Franco in the early 21st century who gets shot by arch rival, a criminal named Kroger. He’s declared brain dead, but doesn’t die…and wakes up in the year 2069. Franco teams up with his cop grandson to take down Kroger once and for all, who is still running a criminal empire at the age of 99.