How “Cop Rock” looks and sounds 31 years later. Guest Blogger, Susan Matysse.

Yes, autumn of 1990. I was 22, dropping out of my English major at Ohio State while trying to drop in with some ragtag group of artists and experimental musicians in the Short North of Columbus. I had just moved out of the Rat Hole apartment in the half-slum that was South Campus and back into the parental estate out west in Lincoln Village, where one of my sisters was also still living and watching the weeknight sitcoms and police and courtroom dramas...one of which was this rather oddball experiment called “Cop Rock”, a police drama like “Hill Street Blues”, but with songs and sometimes dancing.

I can remember watching only one episode, and thanks to our 21st Century tech, I can track down when the specific episode aired, through the IMDb: Wednesday, November 21st, 1990. The day before Thanksgiving. All I remembered was a tragic scene where a small African American boy was lying dead on the ground, an innocent victim of a crossfire between street gangs. His mother and a group of women sing a seriously heart rending gospel lament, demanding to know why their children are not safe here. Commercial break; then the interior of a bar, where a young white officer chats up a slightly older, heavyset white officer and asks why he won’t file the paperwork on the child victim. Heavyset man responds by singing in a rather terse, blunt voice (to a mid tempo synthesizer rhythm) how he’s not really a racist, but when you get down to it, “blue is blue, and black’s just black”. The younger man calls him a real jerk, and moves on.

Next scene; the chief detective comes home to a wife who criticizes him for missing his son’s event at school. He goes to see his son, asleep in bed, and sings a tender lullaby.

My assessment: these musical numbers are awfully klutzy and uneven. The “racist” cop song was especially embarrassing, the gospel lament genuinely good but longer than it needed to be, and the lullaby rather sweet, but seemed to be padding out the running time. This looked to me like an ambitious experiment doomed to fail. In fact, it ran for eleven episodes and was cancelled for good and all.

I give my sister, a longtime fan of musical theater, a lot of credit for giving this show a chance, because absolutely no one else I knew would have. When I so much as said the words “Cop Rock” to any of my art-scene friends, I would get an immediate groan and some version of “Oh my god, worthless trash!” And so the series sank into oblivion and I did my civic duty of forgetting it ever happened.

Fast forward to 2021. Watching “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” on HBO Max. John Oliver presents a very detailed case against drug raids on people’s homes with no warrant, and why these raids shouldn’t happen anymore. It’s a lot to take in, but he decides to take a little edge off the subject by playing a couple of samples of Cop Rock, especially the song of a black-market baby seller declaring “I’m your baby merchant; Tots Are Us!”

And so I said “I have GOT to take a second look at this series, but from start to finish this time.” By autumn, when John told me he would like the Blu Ray of “Fate/Grand Order” as a Christmas present from me, I said, “oh, wait until you hear what I’d like as a present from you! You’ll laugh, for sure.” But when I told him it was “Cop Rock” on DVD (it doesn’t exist on any streaming platform), he said “Done and done”. Because that’s what a good husband says.

So, what is my assessment of the show in its entirety now that 31 years and two months have passed since it last aired on ABC?

It’s considerably more complicated. This may take a while.

Committing myself to watching each episode helped me get to know the characters and the central conflicts. The conventional scenes told a pretty strong and significant story. Story Number One: Detective Vincent LaRusso tracked down a man who shot one of his fellow officers, who died in the line of duty. He handcuffed the man, Tyrone Weeks, in his own home. When Weeks grinned and suggested he’d just get released after a short stint in a holding cell, LaRusso shot him three times in the chest. Then his partner and others on the scene agreed to cover for him and claim LaRusso shot him in self defense, even though we all see this was clearly not the case.

From there, it becomes a real moral debate; was LaRusso justified in murdering Weeks out of revenge for the cop Weeks murdered? Or does he deserve to be imprisoned for use of excessive force? As it unfolds, LaRusso’s partner, Detective Potts, wrestles with his own conscience and decides to hand Chief Hollander a written statement that he witnessed his partner kill the man in cold blood. LaRusso is arrested (and sings “Can’t Keep a Good Man Down”), gets bailed by an attractive lawyer who becomes his lover, and then goes on a radio talk show to tell the public he did not kill Weeks just for being a black ghetto dweller, but merely to take a murderous man off the streets.

Story Number Two is more of a relationship drama: Officer Vicky Quinn is a pretty young woman married to a somewhat older man, Lt. Ralph Ruskin, who has low self esteem because he is overweight and balding. Quinn’s partner on the beat is Officer Andy Campo, tall, young and boyishly handsome. Campo and Quinn flirt playfully to take the edge off their tough job, which drives Ruskin crazy with jealousy. Quinn finally demands she and Ruskin go to counseling, even agreeing to get a different partner to ease her husband’s mind.

Story Number Three is a bit of dark comedy; the Los Angeles mayor, Louise Plank, agrees to improve her looks with plastic surgery just to raise her approval numbers. As soon as she appears with her new face, Police Chief Kendrick, a man who likes cowboy outfits and dislikes powerful women, falls madly in love with her. They begin a relationship which hits the rocks as soon as Kendrick embarrasses himself on camera at LaRusso’s trial, making racist and anti-Semitic remarks about the “Hollywood liberals” who want to see LaRusso convicted.

There is also the poor single mother who sells her baby daughter to that singing “baby merchant” so she can buy cocaine. Quinn and Campo go undercover to entrap the baby seller, but let him free on bail when he agrees to give the baby back to her mother, who then agrees to enter rehab in order to keep her child.

My new assessment: this series had great potential. It covered racism, sexism, addiction, homelessness, gun violence, all the most pressing social issues of the late 1980s (most of which are the same, or worse, in the 2020s). There’s even a moment where the mayor’s aide refuses to come out as a gay man to a journalist because he would rather keep his private life private.

But it tripped itself up with the uneven tone of the musical numbers until it fell flat. As I mentioned, some numbers were soulful and some pretty hard driving, like when a chorus of the homeless voiced their complaint at being forced off their encampment. Some were cringeworthy like “I’m Your Baby Merchant”. The worst song, to me, was sung by Campo’s new partner, Officer Petrovich, a large and aggressive woman who gets so turned on by their most recent bust up of two men in a public disturbance, she begins dancing suggestively upon Campo and declaring “I wanna go Bumpty Bumpty! I wanna go woo, woo woo woo!” I mean, wanna go WHAT? This scene was no doubt played for laughs...it’s always funny when the woman sexually harasses the man, right?...but this was still unprofessional and really not funny.

Likewise, an episode begins with a group of female officers dressing as prostitutes to entrap the men who solicit them. So, of course, they perform a sexy dance number and sing about what they will offer them. Not at all necessary to this plot line and obviously put there for titillation purposes. With each of these scenes, I thought “yeah. Here’s when the network executives said ‘this is not going to work out’”.

But the cast seemed to take the bad news pretty well. Once each story was resolved in the eleventh and final episode, the last 15 minutes just broke that fourth wall and depicted two of the men saying “I can’t believed we got canceled!” “Well, at least I got to sing you that song about how to romance a lady.” The cast then gathered to sing a farewell song declaring that one day they will rise again. Rather poignant.

And maybe true? What with the series getting promoted on John Oliver’s show and enjoying a new life on DVD (released by “Shout! Factory”, which revives a lot of old nearly-forgotten material)?

I doubt this series could get revived or rebooted in today’s television environment. But I do continue to find the failures of 80s and 90s TV more fascinating than the successes of the time. So, thank you, Shout Factory, and thank you, John Oliver. You have all done your civic duty.

- SMB