In September 1990, ABC launched Cop Rock, a musical police drama.
The timing was perfect. The series had been made in the wake of The Singing Detective, the BBC's critically acclaimed and highly influential musical drama about a writer suffering from psoriatic arthritis, and its author was Stephen Bocho, then riding high from the success of shows like Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law.
"In the early ’80s, a woman who was a Broadway producer or associated with a Broadway producer came to me and said, 'We’d like to talk about bringing Hill Street Blues to Broadway as a musical,'" Bocho told The AV Club, in an excellent oral history of the show. "And we talked about it at the company, and I loved the idea, but it just wasn’t practical. So reluctantly we said, 'No, we can’t do it.'
"But the idea always stuck in my head, because I thought it was a really audacious idea. And that really was the genesis of Cop Rock. I thought, “Well, if I can’t take a cop show to Broadway, maybe I can bring Broadway to a cop show!”
The plot was suitably gritty and the casting predictably formulaic, with a corrupt mayor, a brash police chief, a fair-minded police captain, a pair of cops with eyes only for each other, and enough bad sorts and ne'er-do-wells to fill 11 episodes. It was the kind of formula many other successful US cop shows had followed.
Where Cop Rock fell down was with the singing. Several times in every show, the spoken dialogue would be ditched as the cast broke into song, often in ways that defied both logic and sanity. Like at the climax of the pilot episode, when a drug-addicted mother sings Randy Newman's Sandman’s Coming to her baby before selling it into adoption to raise money to support her habit.
Then there's the somewhat problematic Bumpty Bumpty, when a female police officer more-or-less sexually assaults her partner after becoming aroused at a crime scene. "I wanna go bumpty bumpty!" she sings. "I wanna go woozy woo woo woo!" It was, at the very least, the kind of behaviour Columbo never engaged in.
Or on The Homeless Song, when a police exercise to clear the streets of undesirable types is hindered when the targets of their operation break into song.
Cop Rock was doomed from the off. The critics panned it from the off. And the viewers switched off altogether. ABC encouraged Bochco to drop the songs and turn the show into the thing he was good at – the conventional police drama – but he refused and a second series never materialised. It was probably never even discussed.
Positive critical reappraisal has not yet been forthcoming. The Bad Television website described the series as "God’s punishment on society for all the evil that we have done," TV Guide ranked it the eighth worst show ever made (a list topped by The Jerry Springer Show), and the AV Club described Bocho's project as a "debacle so legendary" that the show’s name had become shorthand for "surreally misconceived projects." Even the New York Times got involved, suggesting that Cop Rock may have laid the groundwork for much of the bad television that ensued.
"I’m sorry it didn’t work, but I’ve never been ashamed of it or embarrassed by Cop Rock," said Bocho. "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!"
