Old Stories: NYPD Blue and Seinfeld
Andy Sipowicz and George Constanza
This is False Choices, a substack dedicated to the idea that there are more and better choices in life that what we are led to believe. Each Friday I publish a review of an old story, a cultural artifact from an earlier time. Today, I look at the two most popular television shows of the 90’s. Glad to have you here, and please, if you have something to add, hit the comments icon, would love to hear it.
I never had the opportunity to watch NYPD Blue, though it had a continuous run on broadcast television from 1993 to 2005. Interesting, there were 5 overlapping years with Seinfeld, a comedy which ran from 1989 to 1998. More on this later. I might have caught one or two shows at some point, but then it was over, and I never gave it another thought until I saw it come up on my Youtube algorithm recently. But I couldn’t watch it on YT, too many commercials, and poor quality. Unbelievably, I went ahead and plonked down 17.99 for one month of Hulu, a streaming service that does not require a long term contract. I watched a few episodes, then a few more. I was hooked. The show was renown for its realism, its depiction of the drug mayhem during the crack and meth crisis of the 90’s and 00’s.
I’m not sure what idea the head honchos had at the outset, but the show turned into Andy Sipowicz, Detective around the 2nd season, which was perfectly understandable since he stole the camera, whether it was his scene or not. His face expressed anger, hatred and inspired fear, while his biting sarcasm could be laugh out loud hilarious; a sarcasm that left American culture in recent years. We must give the actor Dennis Franz his due, not too many men with his looks have been leading men on prime time TV for a twelve year run. Let’s be honest, he’s not exactly Tyrone Power!
But something about him caught the public’s attention. He was a working class, middle aged, white man with a ridiculous haircut and the physique of a corporate middle manager, but he brought you along with him; his impatience and frustration with other groups of people (blacks, Puerto Ricans, etc.) and their same with him, his complete inability to suffer foolishness, his aggravation when men do not act confidently or competently, his overriding desire to help others, his loyalty to the police force. Somehow this character, with all his flaws, was a man people could relate to, and so could the critics - 4 Emmy’s for Franz.
Eventually, after Sipowicz took over the show, the next eleven years were about his partners, at work and at home. He married, was widowed, he took up with a few others including his ex-wife, and he got married again. Amidst all of this he had four partners, each of whom left the job differently; one was fired, one died of a heart ailment, one died on the job. It’s a lot of drama, even without the criminals, the victims and their families. The show handles it all with a quick, ‘first person’ camera, as if an unknown and omniscient narrator is present and we see the show through his eyes. Of course we all realize that there is a camera recording any show, but for NYPD Blue the camera appears to have a personality as it moves from character to character as quickly as any of us might. The camera as one of the characters has become more prevalent over time; think of The Office where they reference the camera regularly.
NYPD Blue and its overlap with Seinfeld also brings to mind the bifurcation of American society, which happened, or completed, at roughly the same time. NYPD Blue takes place in Alphabet City, a part of lower Manhattan around Avenues A, B and C. It was a rough area back then. Seinfeld takes place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just a few miles away; a liberal, up market area with lots of posh restaurants and nice family townhouses. It’s hard to believe, but it also makes perfect sense, that these two shows ran during roughly the same years. There’s basically no crime for the Seinfeld crew; they live in a carefree bubble of casual sex and hilarity. The NYPD crew, on the other hand, oversees some of the most horrendous crime you can imagine in a gritty wasteland of throwaway human life.
It’s not some weird mistake that two shows, physically just a few miles from each other, but seemingly on two different planets, ran at the same time. The family instability on every episode of NYPD is the exact opposite of what’s seen on Seinfeld. Admittedly, the Constanzas are a bit of a mess, but they didn’t try to kill one another, a daily occurrence in Alphabet City.
This was a period when the demise of the working class was becoming ever more obvious, (and soon the middle class would follow). No point in going into the economic reasons for what happened during this period and before; it would take several dissertations at a minimum. But what’s obvious is that the sexual revolution was fun and the fount of a lot of good Seinfeld episodes for the upper class, college educated, (remember Elaine’s trip around the Upper West Side for the birth control sponge!). For the lower half of society it was like one of those fog and black ice induced interstate debacles where cars and trucks suddenly come upon a multi-car accident and join the chaos. It takes hours to get the situation under control - the fog must first lift - and a death and injury toll taken.
It didn’t help that drugs had also become a norm in our society, because the drug culture had a similar, very different effect on the two halves of our society. It ruined quite a few lives in the upper class, but not with the same burnt earth devastation of the lower class. Powder cocaine made a mess of a lot of lives, but cocaine rock, smokeable, led to street shootouts, abandoned children, prostitute mothers, and useless, unknown fathers. It was a societal breakdown for the lower half, from which they, and we, have not yet recovered.