The 10 Best Episodes of "New York Undercover"
From a demographic standpoint, I was a very unlikely fan of the Fox crime drama "New York Undercover" which ran for four seasons in the mid-to-late 1990s. I was a white high school student in rural Minnesota growing up on a dirt road surrounded by cornfields, and not a particular fan of the era's hip-hop music that was hard-wired into "New York Undercover's" DNA above and beyond any other series to hit network TV airwaves. But I nonetheless discovered the series and connected with it more than any other series of its era.
In an era of shrinking budgets for primetime series and widespread puritanical shaming about "violence on TV", it was pretty remarkable "New York Undercover" ever made it on the airwaves, and even more remarkable that for three seasons the Harlem-based crime drama maintained a no-apologies ethnic flair that really stood out when I recently revisited the series this spring as there's nothing remotely like it on the airwaves a generation after its 1994 premiere. The legend goes that the idea of an "urban Miami Vice" had been in the works for a couple of years but didn't get greenlit until "Law and Order" producer Dick Wolf put his name behind the project, at which point Fox put it on its 1994 fall lineup to air in the kamikaze Thursday night slot against then ratings powerhouse "Seinfeld". Wolf's association would later prove to be more of a curse than a blessing, but without question in the beginning he was vital in getting the establishment gravitas necessary to secure the funding for a series that demanded the kind of production values that were increasingly hard to come by at that point in time.
And the product was impressive from the starting gate as "New York Undercover" showrunners knew exactly the kind of show they wanted to make and it found its footing right away without enduring the kinds of growing pains so many rookie series do. The primary cast, fronted by Michael DeLorenzo and the particularly charismatic Malik Yoba as young undercover police detectives, immediately shined bright and gelled with a supporting cast that mostly consisted of the detectives' families. The primary hook of "New York Undercover" was its well-produced cold opens, filmed music-video style with a bluesy or hip-hopped soundtrack, that set the stage of each episode with the crime that the detectives would be focusing upon for the remainder of the episode. And the focus on music resurfaced later in the hour with live performances from "Natalie's", a smoky bar that served as an after-hours hangout for the detectives and their social circle. Everybody from James Brown to Mary J. Blige to Brian McKnight to The Temptations took to the Natalie's stage to sing new material and their takes on blues and R & B classics over the series' first three seasons. It was an excellent formula that never grew stale for the series, and some of the best exchanges came when the characters dropped by Natalie's at the end of an ugly case with some closing perspectives.
The stories ran the gamut from more conventional undercover cop show antics with drug kingpins, gunrunners, and serial killers, but the show shined best when it was most provocative on race and class issues, well ahead of its time on a variety of topics regularly making the headlines 20 years ago back in an era when such matters were not exactly in the mainstream. And the treatment was usually three-dimensional and sophisticated. The original blueprint of "New York Undercover" intended for two black officers, but they ended up deciding to go with one black detective and one Puerto Rican, and I think that ultimately served the series better given that it more accurately depicted the demographic splits in pre-gentrification Harlem, and it also made for greater conflict between the partners in cases where one detective would rein in the other if their perspective on a certain case was being skewed by racial or ethnic tribalism. The perspectives of the supporting players in the cast also helped in providing a broader context to the detectives, and the end result was a stunning degree of authenticity for a project of this nature compared to other network TV series which often looked like a middle-aged white guy's interpretation about what life on the mean streets of the big city was like.
I mentioned how "New York Undercover" was set in Harlem before gentrification, and the timing for the series was pretty perfect on that front in that the crack epidemic and street crime generally peaked in the early 1990s and began to recede in the years to come. The series would not have worked as well a decade after its original run, or today for that matter, because of how much New York City has changed, with the dangerous culture of street violence a fraction what it was a quarter century earlier.
"New York Undercover" definitely knew what it wanted to be from the outset and had an impressive first season, but to me it seemed as though the series really found its voice by the end of season 1, which carried over exceptionally well into season 2, far and away the series' best season. It's hard to put a finger on what made "New York Undercover" shine so bright in its second season, but almost every episode sparkled with a number of highly engaging subplots that spanned several episodes. The male leads seemed to mature quite a bit in the second season, after a bit too much emphasis on youthful "coolness" in season 1, and the change was fitting after all of the things Torres and Williams had gone through. And while it's generally a gamble to add a new character, the addition of Lauren Velez as female detective Nina Moreno was a homerun and fit in so well that it was hard to figure how the show got along without her in season 1. The mood of the music matching the stories, always a high point for this series, was most on-point this season as well. Everything that made "New York Undercover" great was firing on all cylinders in its second season.
Unfortunately, off-camera drama would deliver a serious blow to "New York Undercover" after season 2 with Yoba and Delorenzo going on strike with a number of demands for producer Dick Wolf, a hard-nosed negotiator who was fully prepared to replace the actors, but they blinked after a brief walkout in the summer of 1996. Apparently Fox was leveraging some creative concessions as well, insisting on adding a new white detective named Tommy McNamara. Unlike the addition of Detective Moreno the season before, the McNamara character never felt like a natural fit and his character's story arc cut into the screen time of the other characters and thus never clicked with fans. The series crawled down another distracting rabbit hole in season 3 with a multi-episode arc of an extramarital affair between Lieutenant Cooper and the male captain. The Cooper character was in need of some depth, but this arc was a miscalculation that led nowhere.
Despite all of this, the core of the "New York Undercover" franchise held strong in season 3 and they continued to make some great episodes. The exciting season 3 finale was one of those episodes, featuring a vicious group of bank robbers. But despite the episode's general appeal, producer Dick Wolf's vindictiveness turned it into one of the most depressing hours of television in my lifetime, with a car bomb killing off the Eddie Torres character in the final scene. Detective McNamara was gruesomely killed off earlier in the episode and it set the stage for a complete cast and creative overhaul for the series' fourth season. Even though "New York Undercover" never got great ratings, it had a strong core following and foisting this cast overhaul on the audience would prove to be the biggest marketing miscalculation since the "new Coke".
"New York Undercover" returned for its fourth season in January 1998 as a midseason replacement, and almost everything was different. Only two of the previous season's core five characters (JC Williams and Nina Moreno) made the cut into season 4 and they were now working as part of a secret off-the-grid NYPD unit. Most of the series' writers and producers were gone, the music-fueled cold-opens and Natalie's denouements were scrapped, and the stories faltered into a sort of generic "Mission: Impossible" mold, with three new characters that failed to excite. It didn't take long before the revamped "New York Undercover" proved itself a flop. Fox pulled it from the schedule after only eight weeks, airing the remaining episodes over the summer. I suspect the series was probably on its last season no matter what given that Fox didn't put in on their 1997 fall schedule, but the structural shakeup sure was a depressing way to see a once-great series fade into oblivion.
Like most "New York Undercover" fans, I effectively choose to ignore that the revamped fourth season ever happened and focus entirely on the series' first three seasons for overarching critiques. The show had very few tangible downsides, but as I hinted at earlier, the detectives' characters sometimes behaved a little too immaturely in season 1, but that was rectified by season 2. Another small critique is that there was a "small world" factor that was sometimes hard to swallow given that the show was set in New York City. When the detectives had to report to a homicide at a middle school, the victim would turn out to be Williams' son's tutor, as one example off the top of my head. This at times strained credibility, but the upside was that any time the main characters' families were brought in for subplots, the series proved most entertaining. And lastly, I had a mostly negative take on the Lieutenant Cooper character. Patti D'Arbanville had some solid acting chops generally, but she usually needed to take it down a couple of notches in her bull-in-a-china-shop portrayal of the dyspeptic lieutenant barking orders to the detectives or suspects. The character had some potential but only on a couple of occasions was she three-dimensional. This is a pretty slender list of grievances for 76 episodes worth of quality cop drama fare though.
It was pretty easy to make a top-10 list of favorite episodes of this series. The iconic episodes that left the biggest impression on me back in the 1990s held up as my favorites two decades later as well. The stories were fresh and original and ahead of their time, often at multiple levels.....
#10. "Fade Out" (Season 3, Episode, 13....originally aired January 16, 1997)....A 13-year-old boy opens this episode with the backdrop of his rough-and-tumble urban neighborhood, musing on videotape how he feels lucky to be alive to reach his next birthday given the culture of the neighborhood, and the remainder of the episode proceeds to vindicate this confession. The boy takes to the streets with his camcorder to capture the neighborhood for a class project. He really seems to have found his calling with the camera, but it leads him to a degree of voyeurism that leads to his capture of a murder on camera by a young gangbanger from the neighborhood who is completely bereft of a conscience, as is revealed by his confession to the police in the episode's closing. Adding an extra layer to the exposition is the young boy's embittered single mother was a former girlfriend of Williams (small world that New York City!) which leads to some intriguing backstory for both JC and Chantel. It was episodes like this--where "New York Undercover" really had something different to say compared to your average crime drama--that the show was most memorable and compelling.
#9. "Buster and Claudia" (Season 2, Episode 6....originally aired October 5, 1995)....Opening this episode was one of the series' coolest cold opens, filmed in black and white and featuring a young woman living in poverty in a dark world....until her "savior" shows up in a shiny red car, and as they embrace the black and white turns to color. It was a pretty slick production trick for mid-90s TV, and the scene became even more dramatic when the young couple proceeded onto an armed robbery of a jewelry store in the aftermath. The male lead was played by a young Terrence Howard (the future Luscious Lyon from "Empire") as an ex-con trying to play it straight but continually struggling to put his past behind him and ultimately drawing his girlfriend into a string of quick-cash jewel heists. The action-packed hour featured some great plot twists and social commentary, and the secondary plot also sizzled, with Torres' father getting involved with a loan shark to take over the Natalie's business and ultimately leading to a brutal conflict with Eddie. When I talk about how "New York Undercover" was firing on all cylinders in season 2, this is exactly the kind of episode I'm talking about.
#8. "The Reaper" (Season 3, Episode 12.....originally aired January 9, 1997)....Taking some inspiration from the mid-90s Susan Sarandon-Sean Penn film "Dead Man Walking", NYU nailed an episode featuring a young man in the final hours of death row, accepting of his responsibility of the murder of a mugging victim and resigned to lethal injection. But the man's construction worker father is determined to take a last stand to convince the police to look into his son's case one final time, stealing some explosives from the construction site where he worked and holding Lieutenant Cooper hostage at the police station with a bomb strapped to his chest. While it wasn't hard to figure out that the accused's otherwise squeaky-clean friend would end up being the real trigger-man, the delivery was outstanding, and the closing minutes provided one of the most gripping and emotional scenes of this series' run, where the convicted killer, even after it's been determined was not the trigger man, was still put to death, making extended eye contact with the embittered daughter of the shooting victim as she watched the execution from the gallery. The viewer could glean a number of different takeaways from their body language during this extended silent scene, but my takeaway was that the victim's daughter realized the wrong call had been made as she looked in the eyes of the remorseful convict in his final moments. Great stuff in what was a more conservative time generally for television.
#7. "Is It a Crime?" (Season 3, Episode 22....originally aired May 1, 1997)....Humanization of the marginalized was a consistent strong point of "New York Undercover", and one of its most effective gambits came in this episode where a 10-year-old girl is killed in the slum housing where she lived with her working-class father. It is quickly determined the child's death was an accident, the result of a defective, unrepaired elevator in the building which Detective Williams himself almost fell down. The girl's father and Detective Williams took it upon themselves to get some justice for the girl even after the death was ruled accidental, wading through the layers of slumlords and building inspectors who had been looking the other way while the safety standards of the building deteriorated. The story was very strong generally, with some great images of the dangers awaiting around every corner that the girl endured just walking home from school every day, but what took it to an entirely different level were the handful of posthumous monologues delivered by the girl that punctuated the hour, featuring the musings of an intelligent child with a black-screen background. Her commentaries fit the mood of the scenes over the course of the hour, with a hopeful closing commentary about "most people in her neighborhood being good" closing the hour right after the community gathered together for a benefit in her honor. Adding these monologues by the girl was a masterstroke in putting a face to a dead child that would otherwise have gone down in history as a mere statistic of urban tragedy.
#6. "Sympathy for the Devil" (Season 2, Episode 18....originally aired February 15, 1996)....As I said earlier, "New York Undercover" was most compelling when it got the most provocative, and the stage was certainly set for that in this episode where three young black men were bulldozing down the streets on a petty crime spree, mugging little old ladies and beating up homeless people. But shit got real for them when an older couple was shot (the wife being killed) jogging in Central Park, and the young men picked over the belongings of the dead woman like vultures. As news reports circulated about young black men being seen near the victims, a tidal wave of racial profiling ensued with dozens of young black men confronted and detained by police. Detective Williams was aggressively questioned as well, emasculated in front of his son (and another boy and his father) while walking home from a hockey game. The episode's ending wasn't anything that a regular viewer of cop shows wouldn't likely pick up on, but the racial profiling angle and its consequences was handled tactfully and three-dimensionally, with Detective Williams' son pointing out that JC had partaken in some of the same tendencies when it came to his parenting choices. "New York Undercover" was the only series that had even thought about the concept of racial profiling let alone dedicated an entire episode to it back in the 1990s.
#5. "Manchild" (Season 1, Episode 24.....originally aired April 27, 1995).....I said in the overall series' writeup that "New York Undercover" really seemed to find its voice towards the end of the first season, and no episode better reflected that than "Manchild", featuring an 11-year-old boy hanging out with gang-banging older teenagers and, after a minor diss at an after-school basketball game, the young boy proceeds to cold-bloodedly gun down another kid at the shocking end of the cold open. The boy was friends with Detective Williams' son and in their scenes together, the killer is portrayed as a sweet kid prematurely corrupted by the poisonous culture of the streets and unable to discern right from wrong. The episode was already very provocative but became even more powerful when the older teens the young boy had committed murder for turned on him and ended up shooting down in the streets. There were moments of preachiness in the episode, and in general throughout the series, but the new frontier tone of the storytelling on network TV made the preachiness work, and never better when Detective Williams discovered that his own son had claimed possession of the other boy's handgun. There was much to like through "New York Undercover's" first season, but this episode was head and shoulders above the rest.
#4. "Tag You're Dead" (Season 2, Episode 2....originally aired September 7, 1995)....The second season of NYU sparkled from the outset and managed to foreshadow the headline-grabbing Trayvon Martin incident nearly two decades ahead of schedule with a would-be vigilante patrolling the streets and confronting a duo of graffiti artists spray-painting a building in a cold open featuring a pitch-perfect TLC song that sets the mood brilliantly. The confrontation leads to an armed gunfight leaving one of the boys dead and the other crippled, and their gang out for revenge. The television portrayal of the shooter is relatively three-dimensional (less cartoonish than the real-life George Zimmerman), so much so that Detective Williams makes an uncharacteristic connection with him, being on a bit of a bloodthirsty streak after his fiance's killer was released on a technicality. There was a great gravesite visit scene early in the episode by Williams that sets the stage. A lot goes on in the hour and the tension is palpable as it becomes clear that it's either gonna be "him or them" regarding the vigilante and the gang members, and the narrative just comes together with a great, albeit tragic, closing ribbon. Only two episodes into the second season and it was already clear that the show was operating at a whole other level than it had in season 1.
#3. "The Finals" (Season 2, Episode 11.....originally aired November 16, 1995)....In two prior episodes in season 1, Ice-T guest starred as unhinged gangster Danny Cort, who killed Detective Williams' fiancee and unborn child in the season 1 finale as revenge against the accidental death of Cort's brother at the hands of Williams. But it was Ice-T's final appearance in the role in season 2 that featured the most epic script, as Danny Cort stepped up his game to mess with Williams and finish off his revenge fantasy. Williams' newest girlfriend, played by Naomi Campbell for a handful of prior episodes, was revealed as a Danny Cort lieutenant in on the scam to break Williams down and turn everyone against him. The Danny Cort character rose to the stature of Michael Des Barres' "Murdoc" on "MacGyver" in this episode, always operating a couple steps ahead of Williams and blindsiding him every step of the way. It was a tense and eventful hour, culminating in a questionable shooting that would sadly prevent any further Ice-T guest roles on the series. The follow-up episode with the internal affairs investigation of JC's shooting was also exceptional, just missing my top-10 list. "The Finals" is probably the only episode in my NYU top-10 that didn't provide any overarching social commentary. It was just fun, and I'm glad "New York Undercover" proved itself able to sparkle at those types of episodes as well as the more socially provocative shows.
#2. "Student Affairs" (Season 2, Episode 7.....originally aired October 12, 1995)...Only a couple of months after the Michelle Pfeiffer inner-city teacher movie "Dangerous Minds", the small screen put forward a darker and more suitably cynical take with this outstanding "New York Undercover" episode set in an extremely tough Harlem high school where JC went undercover as a high school teacher to investigate a student murder. Back in the mid-90s, the "school shooter culture" was actually quite a bit more prolific than it is today, but back then it was more likely to be shooters settling grudges against a couple of selected students rather than a deranged mass murderer randomly mowing down people with an assault weapon. The environment portrayed in the high school in this NYU episode was more in keeping with the former scenario, with a misunderstanding about a girl leading to a homicide. The rising tension after the murder led to a "kill or be killed" cycle that was captured with stunning authenticity for network television with a compelling hip-hopped soundtrack that added to the authenticity. The subplot in the episode was also excellent, with Torres having already taken a beating by the gangster hassling his father, and now taking a beating while undercover as a janitor at the school and getting caught up in a melee in the bathroom. The intense pain brought about his experimentation with pain pills, the foundation of a pending story arc where Torres battles some of the same addiction demons as his father. This was "New York Undercover" at its most compelling.
#1. "A Time to Kill" (Season 2, Episode 14.....originally aired January 4, 1996).....It wasn't until my full viewing of the entire series that I settled upon the poignant "Time to Kill" episode as the series' shining achievement. The cold open told a great story in itself, with two young cops documenting their weddings and early married life on videotape. The recording continues while on-duty and happens to capture one of the officers' live executions as the initiation for a vicious Latin gang. The killer gets off in the murder trial and his widow goes vigilante, gunning down his killer in the ensuing days. The whole series of events plays out in the cold open, brilliantly set to music with the chilling Los Lobos song "For Just One Man" which perfectly sets the mood. The episode could have gone a number of directions from there, but the narrative pivoted focus to the witness of the gangbanger's killing, a teenage girl raised in the ugly gangbanger culture who connected with Detective Moreno. A tide of vengeance and retribution ensued with great character development throughout and the ticking time bomb of the AIDS virus spreading its way through the characters. The episode was dark and disturbing in many ways but made for a raw and compelling hour of television, and never more real that when the teen gang girl's heroin-addicted mother has a one-on-one with Moreno in the closing scene following her daughter's death.
I've never seen "The Wire" but it's long been at my list of TV police dramas I most want to check out, celebrated as an intelligent look at the culture of the drug-addled urban jungles of Baltimore. But certainly for network television, no other series in my lifetime can rival "New York Undercover" in the realm of the tough urban cop show. It managed to be fast-paced and action-packed while still seeming authentic and character-driven. It could be deadly serious but had enough fun, lighthearted, and purely human moments to be that rare TV show with a soul. The decision to massively retool the series after its third season remains a blunder of epic proportion, but outside of unfortunate final chapter, my opinion of the series was only enhanced after my first revisit of it in nearly a decade. The series' managed to work on two levels in capturing the cultural zeitgeist of its era more than anything else on television, but does so with storytelling that holds up very well. There's nothing like it on the air today, and in one sense that's too bad because the show's perspective would still be useful in today's culture, but on the other hand, I enjoy that this series has such a unique fingerprint on the landscape of television history. It's a shame it never realized the kind of large-scale audience it deserved, but the continued acclaim of its fans more than 20 years later speaks volumes of the impact it left on us.
In an era of shrinking budgets for primetime series and widespread puritanical shaming about "violence on TV", it was pretty remarkable "New York Undercover" ever made it on the airwaves, and even more remarkable that for three seasons the Harlem-based crime drama maintained a no-apologies ethnic flair that really stood out when I recently revisited the series this spring as there's nothing remotely like it on the airwaves a generation after its 1994 premiere. The legend goes that the idea of an "urban Miami Vice" had been in the works for a couple of years but didn't get greenlit until "Law and Order" producer Dick Wolf put his name behind the project, at which point Fox put it on its 1994 fall lineup to air in the kamikaze Thursday night slot against then ratings powerhouse "Seinfeld". Wolf's association would later prove to be more of a curse than a blessing, but without question in the beginning he was vital in getting the establishment gravitas necessary to secure the funding for a series that demanded the kind of production values that were increasingly hard to come by at that point in time.
And the product was impressive from the starting gate as "New York Undercover" showrunners knew exactly the kind of show they wanted to make and it found its footing right away without enduring the kinds of growing pains so many rookie series do. The primary cast, fronted by Michael DeLorenzo and the particularly charismatic Malik Yoba as young undercover police detectives, immediately shined bright and gelled with a supporting cast that mostly consisted of the detectives' families. The primary hook of "New York Undercover" was its well-produced cold opens, filmed music-video style with a bluesy or hip-hopped soundtrack, that set the stage of each episode with the crime that the detectives would be focusing upon for the remainder of the episode. And the focus on music resurfaced later in the hour with live performances from "Natalie's", a smoky bar that served as an after-hours hangout for the detectives and their social circle. Everybody from James Brown to Mary J. Blige to Brian McKnight to The Temptations took to the Natalie's stage to sing new material and their takes on blues and R & B classics over the series' first three seasons. It was an excellent formula that never grew stale for the series, and some of the best exchanges came when the characters dropped by Natalie's at the end of an ugly case with some closing perspectives.
The stories ran the gamut from more conventional undercover cop show antics with drug kingpins, gunrunners, and serial killers, but the show shined best when it was most provocative on race and class issues, well ahead of its time on a variety of topics regularly making the headlines 20 years ago back in an era when such matters were not exactly in the mainstream. And the treatment was usually three-dimensional and sophisticated. The original blueprint of "New York Undercover" intended for two black officers, but they ended up deciding to go with one black detective and one Puerto Rican, and I think that ultimately served the series better given that it more accurately depicted the demographic splits in pre-gentrification Harlem, and it also made for greater conflict between the partners in cases where one detective would rein in the other if their perspective on a certain case was being skewed by racial or ethnic tribalism. The perspectives of the supporting players in the cast also helped in providing a broader context to the detectives, and the end result was a stunning degree of authenticity for a project of this nature compared to other network TV series which often looked like a middle-aged white guy's interpretation about what life on the mean streets of the big city was like.
I mentioned how "New York Undercover" was set in Harlem before gentrification, and the timing for the series was pretty perfect on that front in that the crack epidemic and street crime generally peaked in the early 1990s and began to recede in the years to come. The series would not have worked as well a decade after its original run, or today for that matter, because of how much New York City has changed, with the dangerous culture of street violence a fraction what it was a quarter century earlier.
"New York Undercover" definitely knew what it wanted to be from the outset and had an impressive first season, but to me it seemed as though the series really found its voice by the end of season 1, which carried over exceptionally well into season 2, far and away the series' best season. It's hard to put a finger on what made "New York Undercover" shine so bright in its second season, but almost every episode sparkled with a number of highly engaging subplots that spanned several episodes. The male leads seemed to mature quite a bit in the second season, after a bit too much emphasis on youthful "coolness" in season 1, and the change was fitting after all of the things Torres and Williams had gone through. And while it's generally a gamble to add a new character, the addition of Lauren Velez as female detective Nina Moreno was a homerun and fit in so well that it was hard to figure how the show got along without her in season 1. The mood of the music matching the stories, always a high point for this series, was most on-point this season as well. Everything that made "New York Undercover" great was firing on all cylinders in its second season.
Unfortunately, off-camera drama would deliver a serious blow to "New York Undercover" after season 2 with Yoba and Delorenzo going on strike with a number of demands for producer Dick Wolf, a hard-nosed negotiator who was fully prepared to replace the actors, but they blinked after a brief walkout in the summer of 1996. Apparently Fox was leveraging some creative concessions as well, insisting on adding a new white detective named Tommy McNamara. Unlike the addition of Detective Moreno the season before, the McNamara character never felt like a natural fit and his character's story arc cut into the screen time of the other characters and thus never clicked with fans. The series crawled down another distracting rabbit hole in season 3 with a multi-episode arc of an extramarital affair between Lieutenant Cooper and the male captain. The Cooper character was in need of some depth, but this arc was a miscalculation that led nowhere.
Despite all of this, the core of the "New York Undercover" franchise held strong in season 3 and they continued to make some great episodes. The exciting season 3 finale was one of those episodes, featuring a vicious group of bank robbers. But despite the episode's general appeal, producer Dick Wolf's vindictiveness turned it into one of the most depressing hours of television in my lifetime, with a car bomb killing off the Eddie Torres character in the final scene. Detective McNamara was gruesomely killed off earlier in the episode and it set the stage for a complete cast and creative overhaul for the series' fourth season. Even though "New York Undercover" never got great ratings, it had a strong core following and foisting this cast overhaul on the audience would prove to be the biggest marketing miscalculation since the "new Coke".
"New York Undercover" returned for its fourth season in January 1998 as a midseason replacement, and almost everything was different. Only two of the previous season's core five characters (JC Williams and Nina Moreno) made the cut into season 4 and they were now working as part of a secret off-the-grid NYPD unit. Most of the series' writers and producers were gone, the music-fueled cold-opens and Natalie's denouements were scrapped, and the stories faltered into a sort of generic "Mission: Impossible" mold, with three new characters that failed to excite. It didn't take long before the revamped "New York Undercover" proved itself a flop. Fox pulled it from the schedule after only eight weeks, airing the remaining episodes over the summer. I suspect the series was probably on its last season no matter what given that Fox didn't put in on their 1997 fall schedule, but the structural shakeup sure was a depressing way to see a once-great series fade into oblivion.
Like most "New York Undercover" fans, I effectively choose to ignore that the revamped fourth season ever happened and focus entirely on the series' first three seasons for overarching critiques. The show had very few tangible downsides, but as I hinted at earlier, the detectives' characters sometimes behaved a little too immaturely in season 1, but that was rectified by season 2. Another small critique is that there was a "small world" factor that was sometimes hard to swallow given that the show was set in New York City. When the detectives had to report to a homicide at a middle school, the victim would turn out to be Williams' son's tutor, as one example off the top of my head. This at times strained credibility, but the upside was that any time the main characters' families were brought in for subplots, the series proved most entertaining. And lastly, I had a mostly negative take on the Lieutenant Cooper character. Patti D'Arbanville had some solid acting chops generally, but she usually needed to take it down a couple of notches in her bull-in-a-china-shop portrayal of the dyspeptic lieutenant barking orders to the detectives or suspects. The character had some potential but only on a couple of occasions was she three-dimensional. This is a pretty slender list of grievances for 76 episodes worth of quality cop drama fare though.
It was pretty easy to make a top-10 list of favorite episodes of this series. The iconic episodes that left the biggest impression on me back in the 1990s held up as my favorites two decades later as well. The stories were fresh and original and ahead of their time, often at multiple levels.....
#10. "Fade Out" (Season 3, Episode, 13....originally aired January 16, 1997)....A 13-year-old boy opens this episode with the backdrop of his rough-and-tumble urban neighborhood, musing on videotape how he feels lucky to be alive to reach his next birthday given the culture of the neighborhood, and the remainder of the episode proceeds to vindicate this confession. The boy takes to the streets with his camcorder to capture the neighborhood for a class project. He really seems to have found his calling with the camera, but it leads him to a degree of voyeurism that leads to his capture of a murder on camera by a young gangbanger from the neighborhood who is completely bereft of a conscience, as is revealed by his confession to the police in the episode's closing. Adding an extra layer to the exposition is the young boy's embittered single mother was a former girlfriend of Williams (small world that New York City!) which leads to some intriguing backstory for both JC and Chantel. It was episodes like this--where "New York Undercover" really had something different to say compared to your average crime drama--that the show was most memorable and compelling.
#9. "Buster and Claudia" (Season 2, Episode 6....originally aired October 5, 1995)....Opening this episode was one of the series' coolest cold opens, filmed in black and white and featuring a young woman living in poverty in a dark world....until her "savior" shows up in a shiny red car, and as they embrace the black and white turns to color. It was a pretty slick production trick for mid-90s TV, and the scene became even more dramatic when the young couple proceeded onto an armed robbery of a jewelry store in the aftermath. The male lead was played by a young Terrence Howard (the future Luscious Lyon from "Empire") as an ex-con trying to play it straight but continually struggling to put his past behind him and ultimately drawing his girlfriend into a string of quick-cash jewel heists. The action-packed hour featured some great plot twists and social commentary, and the secondary plot also sizzled, with Torres' father getting involved with a loan shark to take over the Natalie's business and ultimately leading to a brutal conflict with Eddie. When I talk about how "New York Undercover" was firing on all cylinders in season 2, this is exactly the kind of episode I'm talking about.
#8. "The Reaper" (Season 3, Episode 12.....originally aired January 9, 1997)....Taking some inspiration from the mid-90s Susan Sarandon-Sean Penn film "Dead Man Walking", NYU nailed an episode featuring a young man in the final hours of death row, accepting of his responsibility of the murder of a mugging victim and resigned to lethal injection. But the man's construction worker father is determined to take a last stand to convince the police to look into his son's case one final time, stealing some explosives from the construction site where he worked and holding Lieutenant Cooper hostage at the police station with a bomb strapped to his chest. While it wasn't hard to figure out that the accused's otherwise squeaky-clean friend would end up being the real trigger-man, the delivery was outstanding, and the closing minutes provided one of the most gripping and emotional scenes of this series' run, where the convicted killer, even after it's been determined was not the trigger man, was still put to death, making extended eye contact with the embittered daughter of the shooting victim as she watched the execution from the gallery. The viewer could glean a number of different takeaways from their body language during this extended silent scene, but my takeaway was that the victim's daughter realized the wrong call had been made as she looked in the eyes of the remorseful convict in his final moments. Great stuff in what was a more conservative time generally for television.
#7. "Is It a Crime?" (Season 3, Episode 22....originally aired May 1, 1997)....Humanization of the marginalized was a consistent strong point of "New York Undercover", and one of its most effective gambits came in this episode where a 10-year-old girl is killed in the slum housing where she lived with her working-class father. It is quickly determined the child's death was an accident, the result of a defective, unrepaired elevator in the building which Detective Williams himself almost fell down. The girl's father and Detective Williams took it upon themselves to get some justice for the girl even after the death was ruled accidental, wading through the layers of slumlords and building inspectors who had been looking the other way while the safety standards of the building deteriorated. The story was very strong generally, with some great images of the dangers awaiting around every corner that the girl endured just walking home from school every day, but what took it to an entirely different level were the handful of posthumous monologues delivered by the girl that punctuated the hour, featuring the musings of an intelligent child with a black-screen background. Her commentaries fit the mood of the scenes over the course of the hour, with a hopeful closing commentary about "most people in her neighborhood being good" closing the hour right after the community gathered together for a benefit in her honor. Adding these monologues by the girl was a masterstroke in putting a face to a dead child that would otherwise have gone down in history as a mere statistic of urban tragedy.
#6. "Sympathy for the Devil" (Season 2, Episode 18....originally aired February 15, 1996)....As I said earlier, "New York Undercover" was most compelling when it got the most provocative, and the stage was certainly set for that in this episode where three young black men were bulldozing down the streets on a petty crime spree, mugging little old ladies and beating up homeless people. But shit got real for them when an older couple was shot (the wife being killed) jogging in Central Park, and the young men picked over the belongings of the dead woman like vultures. As news reports circulated about young black men being seen near the victims, a tidal wave of racial profiling ensued with dozens of young black men confronted and detained by police. Detective Williams was aggressively questioned as well, emasculated in front of his son (and another boy and his father) while walking home from a hockey game. The episode's ending wasn't anything that a regular viewer of cop shows wouldn't likely pick up on, but the racial profiling angle and its consequences was handled tactfully and three-dimensionally, with Detective Williams' son pointing out that JC had partaken in some of the same tendencies when it came to his parenting choices. "New York Undercover" was the only series that had even thought about the concept of racial profiling let alone dedicated an entire episode to it back in the 1990s.
#5. "Manchild" (Season 1, Episode 24.....originally aired April 27, 1995).....I said in the overall series' writeup that "New York Undercover" really seemed to find its voice towards the end of the first season, and no episode better reflected that than "Manchild", featuring an 11-year-old boy hanging out with gang-banging older teenagers and, after a minor diss at an after-school basketball game, the young boy proceeds to cold-bloodedly gun down another kid at the shocking end of the cold open. The boy was friends with Detective Williams' son and in their scenes together, the killer is portrayed as a sweet kid prematurely corrupted by the poisonous culture of the streets and unable to discern right from wrong. The episode was already very provocative but became even more powerful when the older teens the young boy had committed murder for turned on him and ended up shooting down in the streets. There were moments of preachiness in the episode, and in general throughout the series, but the new frontier tone of the storytelling on network TV made the preachiness work, and never better when Detective Williams discovered that his own son had claimed possession of the other boy's handgun. There was much to like through "New York Undercover's" first season, but this episode was head and shoulders above the rest.
#4. "Tag You're Dead" (Season 2, Episode 2....originally aired September 7, 1995)....The second season of NYU sparkled from the outset and managed to foreshadow the headline-grabbing Trayvon Martin incident nearly two decades ahead of schedule with a would-be vigilante patrolling the streets and confronting a duo of graffiti artists spray-painting a building in a cold open featuring a pitch-perfect TLC song that sets the mood brilliantly. The confrontation leads to an armed gunfight leaving one of the boys dead and the other crippled, and their gang out for revenge. The television portrayal of the shooter is relatively three-dimensional (less cartoonish than the real-life George Zimmerman), so much so that Detective Williams makes an uncharacteristic connection with him, being on a bit of a bloodthirsty streak after his fiance's killer was released on a technicality. There was a great gravesite visit scene early in the episode by Williams that sets the stage. A lot goes on in the hour and the tension is palpable as it becomes clear that it's either gonna be "him or them" regarding the vigilante and the gang members, and the narrative just comes together with a great, albeit tragic, closing ribbon. Only two episodes into the second season and it was already clear that the show was operating at a whole other level than it had in season 1.
#3. "The Finals" (Season 2, Episode 11.....originally aired November 16, 1995)....In two prior episodes in season 1, Ice-T guest starred as unhinged gangster Danny Cort, who killed Detective Williams' fiancee and unborn child in the season 1 finale as revenge against the accidental death of Cort's brother at the hands of Williams. But it was Ice-T's final appearance in the role in season 2 that featured the most epic script, as Danny Cort stepped up his game to mess with Williams and finish off his revenge fantasy. Williams' newest girlfriend, played by Naomi Campbell for a handful of prior episodes, was revealed as a Danny Cort lieutenant in on the scam to break Williams down and turn everyone against him. The Danny Cort character rose to the stature of Michael Des Barres' "Murdoc" on "MacGyver" in this episode, always operating a couple steps ahead of Williams and blindsiding him every step of the way. It was a tense and eventful hour, culminating in a questionable shooting that would sadly prevent any further Ice-T guest roles on the series. The follow-up episode with the internal affairs investigation of JC's shooting was also exceptional, just missing my top-10 list. "The Finals" is probably the only episode in my NYU top-10 that didn't provide any overarching social commentary. It was just fun, and I'm glad "New York Undercover" proved itself able to sparkle at those types of episodes as well as the more socially provocative shows.
#2. "Student Affairs" (Season 2, Episode 7.....originally aired October 12, 1995)...Only a couple of months after the Michelle Pfeiffer inner-city teacher movie "Dangerous Minds", the small screen put forward a darker and more suitably cynical take with this outstanding "New York Undercover" episode set in an extremely tough Harlem high school where JC went undercover as a high school teacher to investigate a student murder. Back in the mid-90s, the "school shooter culture" was actually quite a bit more prolific than it is today, but back then it was more likely to be shooters settling grudges against a couple of selected students rather than a deranged mass murderer randomly mowing down people with an assault weapon. The environment portrayed in the high school in this NYU episode was more in keeping with the former scenario, with a misunderstanding about a girl leading to a homicide. The rising tension after the murder led to a "kill or be killed" cycle that was captured with stunning authenticity for network television with a compelling hip-hopped soundtrack that added to the authenticity. The subplot in the episode was also excellent, with Torres having already taken a beating by the gangster hassling his father, and now taking a beating while undercover as a janitor at the school and getting caught up in a melee in the bathroom. The intense pain brought about his experimentation with pain pills, the foundation of a pending story arc where Torres battles some of the same addiction demons as his father. This was "New York Undercover" at its most compelling.
#1. "A Time to Kill" (Season 2, Episode 14.....originally aired January 4, 1996).....It wasn't until my full viewing of the entire series that I settled upon the poignant "Time to Kill" episode as the series' shining achievement. The cold open told a great story in itself, with two young cops documenting their weddings and early married life on videotape. The recording continues while on-duty and happens to capture one of the officers' live executions as the initiation for a vicious Latin gang. The killer gets off in the murder trial and his widow goes vigilante, gunning down his killer in the ensuing days. The whole series of events plays out in the cold open, brilliantly set to music with the chilling Los Lobos song "For Just One Man" which perfectly sets the mood. The episode could have gone a number of directions from there, but the narrative pivoted focus to the witness of the gangbanger's killing, a teenage girl raised in the ugly gangbanger culture who connected with Detective Moreno. A tide of vengeance and retribution ensued with great character development throughout and the ticking time bomb of the AIDS virus spreading its way through the characters. The episode was dark and disturbing in many ways but made for a raw and compelling hour of television, and never more real that when the teen gang girl's heroin-addicted mother has a one-on-one with Moreno in the closing scene following her daughter's death.
I've never seen "The Wire" but it's long been at my list of TV police dramas I most want to check out, celebrated as an intelligent look at the culture of the drug-addled urban jungles of Baltimore. But certainly for network television, no other series in my lifetime can rival "New York Undercover" in the realm of the tough urban cop show. It managed to be fast-paced and action-packed while still seeming authentic and character-driven. It could be deadly serious but had enough fun, lighthearted, and purely human moments to be that rare TV show with a soul. The decision to massively retool the series after its third season remains a blunder of epic proportion, but outside of unfortunate final chapter, my opinion of the series was only enhanced after my first revisit of it in nearly a decade. The series' managed to work on two levels in capturing the cultural zeitgeist of its era more than anything else on television, but does so with storytelling that holds up very well. There's nothing like it on the air today, and in one sense that's too bad because the show's perspective would still be useful in today's culture, but on the other hand, I enjoy that this series has such a unique fingerprint on the landscape of television history. It's a shame it never realized the kind of large-scale audience it deserved, but the continued acclaim of its fans more than 20 years later speaks volumes of the impact it left on us.
posted by Mark at 8:26 PM
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