Brooklyn South.

• Author: Douglas, Susan

It is Monday night, 10:00, and there you sit, exhausted, and turn on the TV to see the much-hyped latest offering from Steven Bochco, Brooklyn South. This was supposed to be "the one to watch" this fall--more "gritty," more "authentic," more "real" (I always love it when TV promises to be more real) than anything else on the tube. The "first nine minutes," advertised CBS, "will leave you breathless." This lack of oxygen seems to have affected the reviewers, who raved about this "high-quality" drama.

The opening sequence shows a stiff phalanx of cops adoringly filmed from a low angle while Mike Post's music--a cross between his old theme for Hill Street Blues and the anthem of The Lion King--announces that we are bearing witness to nobility, courage, altruism. Now that you know how you're supposed to be positioned--upward-gazing, even awestruck--the show can proceed.

Cut to a street scene where a man--and yes, he is African American--breaks into a car. He finds a gun in the glove compartment and, jubilant, starts running down the street. An off-duty cop sees this and, flashing his own gun, tells the guy to stop. The thief shoots the cop instead. Now he has two guns. In a scene that makes most spaghetti westerns look restrained by comparison, he runs down the street brandishing both guns, and by the time the dust settles, he's shot four cops and taken a white woman hostage. Finally he gets shot. The police take him down to the station, with paramedics close behind.

But not close enough. Before they can get to the station, the cops of Brooklyn South have thrown the guy on the floor, where they are hurling epithets at him, and they give him a few kicks for good measure.

The show wants you, the hapless viewer, to be understanding of--even sympathetic to--police brutality. After all, this dark-skinned superpredator just shot four cops--if you were a cop, and just lost four of your colleagues, wouldn't you want to kick him, too? Don't be so quick to condemn police brutality, the show suggests, until you've stood in their shoes. You're not going to identify with that scum bag on the floor, are you? As co-creator David Milch put it, the purpose of the show was to have the audience "get the visceral understanding of how the cops felt."

It is simply stupefying that CBS would actually air this premiere so hard on the heels of the Abner Louima incident, where actual cops--in Brooklyn, no less--sodomized the Haitian suspect and sent him into the...