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'NYPD Blue' producers back on the beat for HBO

Posted on: Monday, 24 October 2005, 00:30 CDT

By Cynthia Littleton

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "Deadwood" creator David Milch is developing a new HBO cop drama with his former "NYPD Blue" collaborator, Bill Clark.

The untitled project is based on Clark's experiences as a rookie undercover officer assigned to keep tabs on the Black Panthers and other countercultural rabble-rousers during the height of New York's radical-chic moment. It was also the era of New York City's Knapp Commission probe that revealed scandalous levels of corruption among New York's finest.

In many ways, the new projects delve into the same themes of lawlessness and the emergence of a social order as Milch's Emmy-winning "Deadwood," which is set to begin its third season next year, probably in tandem with the return of "The Sopranos."

"The post-Vietnam period was a period of enormous moral confusion," Milch said. "It felt very much like a starting-over point, where there was a re-examination of social assumptions about the idea of law enforcement and the social contract."

Clark, who was the inspiration for "NYPD Blue's" central character of Andy Sipowicz, spent seven years in the Army, most of them in Vietnam, before joining the New York Police Department in 1969. He was recruited for undercover work right off of his police academy entrance exam; he was working incognito for the NYPD before he'd ever spent a minute in uniform, Clark said.

"I couldn't tell anyone I was a policeman. I'd never even been to the police academy," Clark said. It didn't help that he was living in an Archie Bunker-ish blue-collar neighborhood where his antiwar activities weren't exactly welcomed. Only a handful of people knew he was on the force. When he came out of the shadows and joined the detective ranks, he came face to face with the official corruption that was then making headlines thanks to whistle-blowers like Frank Serpico.

It will be a tall order to recreate the tension and dark mood of that era in a weekly series, "but if anyone can really make this work," then Milch can, Clark said of his Emmy- and Peabody-winning collaborator.

The show will be developed under a new two-year production pact that also covers Milch's services on "Deadwood." Milch said he's committed to shepherding his earthy Western saga for the foreseeable future. "It requires some cooperation from God, but if he's willing, I'm willing," Milch said.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

Source: REUTERS

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