Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Public Morals: Jana Marie Hupp and Julianne Christie

Public Morals aired on October 30, 1996 on CBS.

A comedy about a vice squad unit of the N.Y.P.D.'s Public Moral's Division, the cops who kept the hookers under control and underage drinkers from hanging out in bars. Ken Schuler ( Donal Logue) was a barely tolerable cop who favored loud Hawaiian shirts and whose only saving grace was his cullinary skill; Richie Blondi ( Larry Romano) was a super-dumb young Italian ("Duh!") from a family full of career criminals. Mickey Crawford ( Justin Louis), handsome but obnoxious, had recently been added to the unit by headquarters to " beef" up the division, and Darnell " Shag" Ruggs ( Joseph Latimore) was the unbelievably square , butt-kissing rookie. The two women in the unit were sexy, streetwise Corinne O'Boyle ( Julianne Christie) and tough, ambitious Val Vandergoodt ( Jana Marie Hupp), who held their own while kidding the guys. They all reported to Lt. Fogerty ( Peter Gerety), a bumbling career cop whose job was to hold the " sleaze patrol" together. John Irvin ( Bill Brochtrup recreating his role from ABC's NYPD Blue) was the very gay administrative assistant recently transferred to the department from uptown.

Producer Steven Bochco's track record with serious cop shows was impressive-Hill Street Blues and N.Y.P.D. Blue, for example-but comedy was another matter, and trying to make light of prostitution , and all those stereotypes , didn't work. The critics brutalized Public Morals from the day it was announced on the CBS schedule ( at which time it was billed , tastefully as "the p**** patrol"). When it finally aired, it was also a commercial disaster. Uncomfortable with the raunchy language and disappointed with minuscule ratings, CBS dropped the show after a single telecast. Thirteen episodes were reportedly filmed; will they ever be seen?

An Article from The New York Times

Bochco Gets a Chance to Try a Laugh Track

By NANCY HASS
Published: July 14, 1996

In the smoke-free back rooms of the television business, Steven Bochco has been called a lot of things over the years: genius, golden goose, "utterly impossible." But "funny" is one adjective that rarely springs to mind when describing the intense auteur of such dramas as "Hill Street Blues," "L.A. Law," "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and "Murder One."

Which is one reason, he readily admits, that getting laughs has come to obsess him lately. "Figuring out what makes a joke funny is such a different game," he says. "Of course, a lot of the rules of television apply, but some of them are useless. Drama, even when there's humor, always springs from the human condition. Comedy exists suspended in space."

Mr. Bochco, 52, has good reason to be serious about comedy right now. His newest project, "Public Morals," is a classic sitcom, his first (his "Hooperman" and "Doogie Howser, M.D." are considered comic dramas). It will make its debut on CBS in September. But his first brush with half-hour comedy has not been a lark.

Despite his track record -- no one in television has created as many sophisticated dramatic hits -- getting "Public Morals" off the ground was a struggle. ABC, the network on which he has had his greatest successes over the years and with whom he is at the tail end of a 10-series deal, turned down the concept more than a year ago. Executives at ABC say there were a number of reasons for this rejection, among them that the network did not have a proper slot for an adult comedy ("Public Morals" is about a squad room of vice cops) and that the humor was potentially too risque for its audience. But the main reason was brutally basic: ABC was simply not convinced that Mr. Bochco could produce a hit sitcom.

The network's biggest concern, says Ted Harbert, the chairman of ABC Entertainment, was that Mr. Bochco himself was not running the show or writing it. Instead he had hired a comedy veteran, Jay Tarses, the quirky creator of such critically acclaimed flops as "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd," "Buffalo Bill" and "The Slap Maxwell Story." (In an unrelated development, Mr. Tarses's daughter, Jamie, was hired away from NBC last month to be president of ABC's entertainment division. Had she been with ABC a year ago, she, not Mr. Harbert, would have had to make the call on "Public Morals.")

Mr. Bochco, who is known to be one of the most hands-on producers in television, told ABC that he would closely supervise the project and guide the story lines but would leave the actual scriptwriting and coordination to Mr. Tarses. Such an arrangement spooked ABC; the network executives were accustomed to having Mr. Bochco control the entire process, and Mr. Harbert considered Mr. Tarses "brilliant but unpredictable."

"In the past, buying a Steven Bochco show was buying Steven Bochco," said Mr. Harbert. "He was the guy. He was the concept, the character and often even the actual words. And if anything went wrong, he could get in there and fix it. Comedy isn't his thing. He doesn't want to sit around a room and think up jokes."

As Mr. Bochco recalled the rejection last winter, when the sting was still fresh, his carefully cultivated California cool was punctured by an edge of adolescent moxie kept in reserve for those moments when he is ready to brawl. He was brought up with too little money on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (his father, Rudolph, was a violin prodigy who as an adult struggled to support his family), and he is known for a nasty counterpunch.

"I understand why they felt they had to say no," he said in January during an interview in his palm-tree-lined office on the Fox lot. "But I'd really like to rub their noses in it."

Mr. Bochco wasted no time looking for a way to prove ABC wrong. He took the idea straight to CBS, with whom he already had a relationship. Next January, just as his ABC deal ends, he will begin a three-series deal with CBS. His contract specifies that CBS has a right to buy any concept that ABC turns down in the interim. And CBS could not afford the reservations that Mr. Harbert had about "Public Morals."

Leslie Moonves, president of CBS Entertainment, bought the concept over breakfast last summer. Unlike ABC, which had given away time-slot commitments to production companies like Dreamworks and Disney (ABC's parent), Mr. Moonves had plenty of holes to plug in the fall '96 schedule. And getting Mr. Bochco on the roster fit perfectly with the network's new strategy of loading up on well-known talent (Bill Cosby and Ted Danson will star in new CBS sitcoms this fall).

"Taking on 'Public Morals' was a risk," Mr. Moonves conceded recently. "It is an edgy show. It's not a domestic sitcom; it's out there. But one of the good things about being the third-place network is that you are pushed to take those kind of chances and sometimes really exciting things come out of it."

The show, which stars an ensemble cast of unknowns, is about a division of the New York City Police Department that was until recently indeed quaintly known as Public Morals. (The department was renamed Vice just a couple of years ago.) Mr. Bochco has touted "Public Morals" as a " 'Barney Miller' for the 90's." He got the idea for the sitcom during a chat with Bill Clark, a former New York City detective who is a producer on "N.Y.P.D. Blue." Mr. Clark's wife, Karen, a retired city police officer, was once assigned to Public Morals.

"As soon as I heard the name Public Morals, I was struck by it," Mr. Bochco said recently during lunch at the China Grill, the restaurant that occupies the ground floor of Black Rock, CBS's headquarters in Manhattan. "It's so ridiculous to think of protecting some sort of public morality."

THE PART OF "BARNEY MILler" that Mr. Bochco hopes he can recreate is the unprettified mix of tedium and absurdity that comes with being a police officer in New York. While shows like "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and "Hill Street Blues" may have broken new ground for realism in the precinct house, their dramatic lighting and slick camera work inarguably render even the gallows humor glamorous.

"During the research stage for 'Public Morals,' " said Mr. Bochco, "we traveled to New York to interview cops and we asked them all which was their favorite police show. Every single one of them said it was 'Barney Miller,' because it was the closest to their experience."

Mr. Bochco said he had not sought to do a sitcom, but once he stumbled on the idea of "Public Morals," he became intrigued with the idea of broadening his oeuvre. "People have a lot of expectations, but I get bored," he explained. "You don't want to repeat yourself. And you want to see what else you have in you."

Although his most infamous foray outside the dramatic realm -- the musical police drama "Cop Rock" in 1990 -- was a widely lampooned failure, Mr. Bochco remains proud of the effort. "A lot of people thought 'Cop Rock' was wrongheaded," he said, "but, God, it was polished."

There is an additional lure to risking a sitcom that Mr. Bochco did not mention: profitability. Hourlong dramas may bring cachet, but it is comedies that bring cold cash in syndication.

" 'Public Morals' appealed to me because of my very raunchy, prurient sense of humor," he said, running a hand through his well-coifed thatch of silver hair. Mr. Bochco, who is well known for blithely seeding both his shows and his conversation with mildly scatological references (some call his humor sophomoric, and he does not disagree), says that "Public Morals" gives him a "place to do that comfortably."

"The story lines involve most of the so-called victimless crimes, prostitution, gambling, porn houses," he said. "I figure that in a situation where there are six-foot transvestite prostitutes there's a lot of built-in absurdity."

There is also, it appears, a built-in proclivity toward profanity and racy slang, which some viewers will no doubt find shocking. "I'm not sophisticated, and I don't apologize for it," he said. "There's not a Noel Coward bone in me." The word whore is used nearly a dozen times in the pilot; one female character accuses another of being a "dyke." The biggest laugh hinges on the use of the word "penis."

Despite the resistance Mr. Bochco met in trying to do a sitcom, he does have a track record in comedy. "Doogie Howser, M.D." was a moderate success that has done well in syndication. And although "Hooperman" failed, it was well received by the critics. Nonetheless he never entertained the idea of writing "Public Morals" himself. Whereas "Doogie" and "Hooperman" were essentially examples of the half-hour one-camera narrative comedy, a close cousin to hourlong drama, "Public Morals" is a classic sitcom. Shot with four cameras in front of a studio audience, it is more like a play presented on a proscenium stage, Mr. Bochco says, a "different species of the beast."

He hired Mr. Tarses when the concept for "Public Morals" was still in its infancy, after a chance meeting on the Fox lot. Mr. Tarses, 57, greeted Mr. Bochco, whom he knew only casually, by telling the producer how much he liked "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and how funny he found the show. Mr. Bochco countered by telling Mr. Tarses about his new idea for a sitcom. In the shadow of the gritty set on which the exteriors of "N.Y.P.D. Blue" are shot, the two men began to brainstorm.

The only aspect of "Public Morals" that they initially disagreed about was the four-camera format. Mr. Tarses wanted to use a single camera; Mr. Bochco and CBS insisted the show be shot as a traditional sitcom. "I wanted to do something in that very straight form," Mr. Bochco explained. "I have no interest in being known as a quirky loser. That holds no charm for me."

In the end, Mr. Tarses caved in, but he still needed an usual set of guarantees. Shy, bearish and perennially underemployed despite his near cult status in the television business, he would do the project only with the understanding that Mr. Bochco would "insulate me from the things I don't do well -- like interacting with other human beings."

But Mr. Tarses turned out to be remarkably easy to work with, Mr. Bochco said. "The night we shot the pilot," he remembered, "Jay turned to me with this sweet, sweet smile and said, 'Isn't this just great, and we all still love each other.' "

For his part, Mr. Tarses insists that Mr. Bochco is much more adept at comedy than he lets on. "Steven likes to portray himself as alien to the genre, but that's nonsense," he said. "The story suggestions, the nuances -- a lot of them are his. He knows what's funny, and that's a lot more than you can say about most of the jerks in this town."

N OW THAT THE PROJECT is headed to prime time, on Wednesdays at 9:30 P.M., Mr. Bochco looks at ABC's rejection with more philosophical distance. His anger seems to have been tempered by the fact that in May the network renewed "Murder One," his crime drama that has had a rocky time in the ratings. True, ABC will move that show to Thursday at 9 P.M., where it will go up against a virtually unbeatable opponent, NBC's "Seinfeld," but Mr. Bochco said he is "profoundly grateful" to ABC for giving it any further chance at all.

The time slot of Wednesday at 9:30 is not exactly a great one for "Public Morals." ABC dominates comedy on that night with "Ellen" and "Grace Under Fire," and CBS's less-urban audience does not have a tradition of watching comedies on Wednesday. In fact, the network has not had a hit comedy on Wednesday since "The Beverly Hillbillies" in the 1960's.

Still, even Mr. Harbert is loath to underestimate Mr. Bochco's ability to defy the odds. "It probably just fuels Steven to say, 'I'm going to show those bastards at ABC,' and more power to him," he said. "I think we made the right decision, but I will never count Steven out. He is a genius, and he has a genius for proving people wrong."

A Review from The New York Times

Vice Problem? Round Up The Usual Detectives!

By CARYN JAMES
Published: October 30, 1996

Sometimes a little scandal doesn't hurt a show. Months ago, when CBS stations saw the pilot of ''Public Morals,'' Steven Bochco's new sitcom set in the vice squad of the New York City Police Department, there was a mini-outcry about the show's vulgar language and salacious content. The truly offensive aspect of the show, though, was that it was excruciatingly unfunny.

Tonight's toned-down premiere offers a different episode, one that is pointedly and atypically stripped of sexual content, as the squad raids a bar serving minors. That strategy manages to make a bad series even worse. The premiere is still not funny, and it doesn't even have the conviction of its crass but titillating taste. Instead of sexual innuendo, there is some trashy name-calling: the police call the minors ''little idiot tramps,'' and in return they are called ''meter maids'' and ''fat Nazi pig bouncers.'' This is so not-clever, you expect the next line to be, ''Your mother wears Army boots.''

An even bigger problem is that the show features a squad room full of stereotypes so predictable and dull that ''Public Morals'' seems like ''Barney Miller'' about to overdose on Valium.

There is Schuler, the boor; Crawford, the womanizer; Ruggs, the uptight African-American, and Biondi, the not-too-bright Tony Danza clone. The two women on the force include Vandergroodt, the tough and smart brunette, and O'Boyle, the tough and sexy blonde.

Only Bill Brochtrup rises above this amateurish mess, playing John Irvin, the same efficient and gushingly loyal administrative assistant he played on ''N.Y.P.D. Blue.'' (He was the blond guy upstairs who gave haircuts.) Of course, he is inhabiting a stereotype, too: the gay man with exquisite taste. But Mr. Brochtrup creates a likable individual beneath the purposefully cliched manner; he defines the difference between edgy, politically incorrect humor and the doltish attempts at it that surround him.

Next week's episode returns the show to its hard-core subject, when O'Boyle's boyfriend is arrested for picking up a prostitute who happens to be Vandergroodt undercover. Crawford ends up drooling over the dejected O'Boyle. The show proves that with or without its smarmy coating, ''Public Morals'' has no idea where to find a funny line.

PUBLIC MORALS
CBS, tonight at 9:30
(Channel 2 in New York)

Created by Steven Bochco and Jay Tarses. Dayna Flanagan and Stephen C. Grossman, producers; Lisa Albert, co-producer; Don Scardino, director; Ken Lamkin, director of photography; Mindy Roffman, art director. Produced by Steven Bochco Productions. Jay Tarses, executive producer.

WITH: Donal Logue (Ken Schuler), Julianne Christie (Corinne O'Boyle), Justin Louis (Mickey Crawford), Jana Marie Hupp (Val Vandergroodt), Joseph Latimore (Darnell ''Shag'' Ruggs), Lawrence Romano (Richie Biondi), Bill Brochtrup (John Irvin) and Peter Gerety (Neil Fogarty).

An Article from USA TODAY

'Morals' puts Tarses back in the line of fire

By Jefferson Graham
USA TODAY

SANTA MONICA, CALIF.-Jay Tarses, the co-creator of the Bob Newhart Show and Buffalo Bill, sums up his career by saying he produces " soft noncommercial inaccessible" shows.

He has vowed he won't work for NBC as long as executives Warren Littlefield and Don Ohlmeyer remain in place.

And he can't work for ABC now that his daughter Jamie is president of the Entertainment division.

Which leaves CBS, home of his Public Morals sitcom, being produced with Steven Bochco after several months of hot discussion regarding the cast's language. The show makes its debut Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT.

The NYPD Blue producer came up with the idea, a show about funny vice cops who deal with so-called victimless crimes. Tarses, 57, liked Bochco's concept and was eager to get back to work after a few years' break.

His taste for television soured after NBC restyled his series Smoldering Lust into Black Tie Affair, which aired for a month in 1993, buried in a bad time slot. After that, Tarses produced a few pilots for FOX and spent time living in a barn in Williamstown, Mass.

He was pitching a project at the 20th Century Fox lot when he ran into Bochco, whom he had never met. A self-confessed NYPD Blue "junkie, " he went up to Bochco and told him he admired the show. A week later, he was called and presented Public Morals.

The show was pitched to ABC, which passed, and CBS quickly picked it up.

Then several months after filming began, a short-lived furer erupted' over two words in the pilot episode-when one of the female cops refers to her unit as the "p---- posse."

At least one CBS affiliate said it wouldn't air the show. Advertisers talked of dropping out. The media made a big deal out of it.

" I thought the whole thing was ridiculous," Tarses says , denying that the mini-controversy was a ploy for ratings. " I was using terminology that real cops use. I didn't make it up.

" The line was in the pilot script and CBS didn't say anything. When we filmed the show, nobody said anything. But then, later on , it just exploded."

The line has been deleted, and Tarses has no problem with the cut. " It's just a line. It doesn't matter to me."

But in the end, CBS actually cut more than the line. They shelved the entire first episode and will open with the second episode on Wednesday.

Tarses thinks the first episode is essential to set up the show. He attributes CBS' decision to a letter-writing campaign by protesters who read about the series and asked that it never air.

The producer also isn't happy about filming in front of a studio audience, something he hasn't done since The Tony Randall Show in 1978 ( " I find the form repulsive," he says).

But Bochco is adament about doing Morals the traditional way, with an emcee and a band, " because it's a show and a party," Tarses says. " He has fun."

Tarses says the best show he's ever worked on was Buffalo Bill, the 1983-84 sitcom with Dabney Coleman as a mean-spirited talk show host. However , he says, behind the scenes was hell, as he and co-creator Tom Patchett weren't speaking to each other and neither of them was talking to Coleman.

" And can you believe I did another show ( The " Slap" Maxwell Story) with Coleman after that? Why didn't I learn?"

A Review from USA TODAY

TV PREVIEW/BY MATT ROUSH

No redemption for low-rent 'Public Morals'

A funny thing ( funnier than the show actually): When you wash some people's mouths out with soap, they're left with nothing much to say.

And so does a show that spent the summer on the hot seat of controversy over its garney language finally arrive, tamed but no less lame. Welcome to the woeful vice cops of Public Morals, a misbegotten collaboration between Steven Bochco ( NYPD Blue) and Jay Tarses ( Buffalo Bill, Molly Dodd), who both should have known better.

Bochco can now say he has attempted a sitcom, a musical ( Cop Rock) and a cartoon ( Capitol Critters)-and failed each time he strayed from his strengths. Too bad he doesn't have a less public forum in which to work these things out.

Public Morals earned much negative publicity over its notoriously potty-mouthed pilot episode, which CBS wisely has shelved. What's left is Barney Miller without the heart or the smarts. Imagine what that sitcom would have been like if you had despised instead of liked everybody.

Grottiest of all in an ensemble of dimwits and/or loudmouths is Donal Logue as the repulsive Detective Schuler. He spends much of tonight's episode baiting his stuffed-shirt black colleague-known as " Shag" because his last name is Ruggs (hoo-haw!)-for brownnosing the boss, calling him " a giant suckhead" from " the great state of butt-kiss."

Schuler earns his loudest groan upon leaving the bathroom and asking if anyone has seen a plunger. " Or do I have to use my hands again?"

Perhaps the point of all this toilet humor is that cops who have to deal each day with human garbage on prostitution stings and bar raids find it rubbing off on themselves.

Got it. Let's move on.

A Review from Entertainment Weekly

TV Review
COPPED OUT
BOCHCO'S COP SITCOM PROVES TO BE A 'PUBLIC' NUISANCE

C By Bruce Fretts

Sitcoms have never been Steven Bochco's strong suit (Q.E.D. Doogie Howser, M.D.), and PUBLIC MORALS (CBS, Wednesdays, 9:30-10 p.m.) is no exception. Cocreated with Jay Tarses (who specializes in shows critics love but people hate, like Buffalo Bill and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd), it's a raunchy, real-life look at cops -- in this case, a New York City vice squad. But what could have been a comedic NYPD Blue ends up playing like a low-rent Barney Miller.

And therein lies the problem. Unlike Miller, Morals lacks a galvanizingly humane central character like Hal Linden's Barney to hold the show together. What Morals does offer is a squad room of oddballs, some ballsy, others just odd. On the plus side: Bill Brochtrup, reprising his NYPD role as gay administrative assistant John Irvin and adding a touch of gentle humor to the otherwise crass proceedings; Peter Gerety as a world-weary lieutenant who seems to have wandered in out of Fox's underrated 1993-94 cop-com Bakersfield P.D.; and tough cookie Julianne Christie, who somehow manages to maintain her dignity even when delivering crappy lines like ''This relationship has been in the toilet for months -- I say it's time to flush!'' On the minus side: George Clooney clone Justin Louis as the office lothario; Eriq La Salle wannabe Joseph Latimore as an uptight buppie; and Matt LeBlanc manque Larry Romano as the token dumb guy. Worst of all is Donal Logue as the piggiest (in both body and mind) of the cops. Better known as greasy cabdriver Jimmy from MTV's promos, Logue is best taken in small doses. Compared with its sitcom competition, Morals fares better than Men Behaving Badly, but Drew Carey's certainly got nothing to worry about. c

To look at acrossover between Public Morals and N.Y.P.D. Blue go to http://poobala.com/blueandpublicmorals.html

For a Website dedicated to Justin Louis go to http://www.videosilva.com/Justin_Louis.htm

For a look at Stephen Bochco go to http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/stevebochco.htm