Will Singing Cops Be Heard? : Steven Bochco’s new series ‘Cop Rock’ is network TV’s great experiment this fall. The question is: Will people buy it?

The scene looks like it could be from any of dozens of gritty TV cop shows: Uniformed police officers drag long-haired, tattooed suspects down a drab, busy corridor; cynical detectives tell each other crude jokes; bored paper-pushers twiddle their pencils; a few low-lifes sit chained to the wall waiting to be booked.

But this isn’t just any cop show.

Watching the action on a tiny monitor on the other side of the fake cop-house wall, director Charles Haid whispers, “Playback.” Suddenly, the room reverberates with the screeching sounds of heavy rock ‘n’ roll funk. Then the cops start to sing, belting it out like gospel singers in a Southern church choir. The paper-pushers join in. Even the prisoners sing.

The cameraman, his camera mounted on his body, floats through the station house, moving around desks, behind counters, zooming close and then pulling back as the cops maneuver the arrestees through a highly stylized booking dance of paperwork, fingerprints and mug shots. Their voices swell: “Just another day behind the desk of this garbage cop machine/Another load of human trash and this broken-down routine/’Cause it’s garbage in and garbage out, ain’t no stopping how it goes/It’s one dirty job, there ain’t no doubt/Garbage in, garbage out.”

The jail door slams. The music screeches to a halt. Haid, who has been swaying and pumping his arm to the music, yells, “Cut. I love it. Print it. What did they say in the truck?” The truck, a 24-track recording studio that sits outside a huge sound stage on the 20th Century Fox lot, reports that there were a few “pops” and out-of-tune notes from the singers. They’ll have to do it again.

It’s just another day of technical nightmares and chaos on the set of this season’s most outlandish television show, “Cop Rock”--Steven Bochco’s latest, and surely most audacious contribution to the prime-time lineup--a show that blends a darkly realistic police drama in the vein of Bochco’s own “Hill Street Blues” with five musical numbers each week. The series premieres on ABC Sept. 26 at 10 p.m.

“So far for this episode, I’ve shot the police chief in a cowboy suit with six-guns riding on a horse down the streets of Watts singing a country-Western song about helping the black people,” says Haid, who once starred as Officer Renko on “Hill Street Blues.” “I shot a man and wife having a domestic brawl, a blues song. I shot a mud-wrestling girl singing in her dressing room. I shot a doctor’s fantasy of plastic surgery (a Robert Palmer-esque tune called “Bigger Is Better When It’s Under Your Sweater”) with six, 6-foot tall gorgeous dancing girls in Spandex nurses outfits. And then this. Plus what we like to call all the regular stuff.”

“Cop Rock” is not the only musical on television this season. NBC has already premiered “Hull High,” which features bits of music and dance amid lighthearted stories set in a contemporary high school. (See accompanying story on Page 86 . ) But whereas singing and high school seem like a reasonable match--see “Fame” and “Grease”--music and an at-times deadly serious cop show don’t appear to be quite so compatible. And while the producers of “Hull High” plan on filming at most only one full-scale production number per show, with the primary actors lip-syncing to the prerecorded voices of other singers, “Cop Rock” features five songs each week drawn from almost every musical genre on the radio dial, and all the actors sing for themselves, with most of it recorded live on the set.

According to nearly everyone involved, “Cop Rock” is an experiment. And like any experiment, it has the potential to explode in the scientists’ faces. Bochco says that each episode of “Cop Rock,” because of the complications of writing and recording the music, costs a third again more than the $1 million or so it costs to produce an average hourlong episode of, say, “L.A. Law,” the legal drama he co-created for NBC. And that’s if everything goes right.

On top of that, musicals haven’t exactly been television mainstays. “Fame,” which did thrive in first-run syndication, lasted only one season on NBC before being canceled in 1983. “Rags to Riches,” another NBC musical, didn’t do any better in 1987. “The Singing Detective,” a widely praised British television musical-drama, was seen by only a small American audience on PBS. Variety shows, once among the most popular programs on television, have gone the way of the eight-track tape player, and the last musical movie smash was “Grease” in 1978.

Meanwhile, the pilot for “Cop Rock” was booed by many ABC affiliate executives when the network screened it for them earlier this summer, and it tested poorly with research audiences. Early reviews haven’t been too kind either. “Even a Bochco can botch one,” Newsweek wrote.

But that hasn’t discouraged Bochco, who has a 10-series, roughly $10-million deal with ABC. “Cop Rock” is his second show under that deal. “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” introduced last season, was the first.

“It is a real high-risk venture from a network point of view,” Bochco said. “It’s not so much a risk for me. If somebody gives you a 10-series commitment and you don’t try something like this, that’s where your risk lies: in getting predictable and doing the same old stuff over and over again.”

Bochco admits that because of his long-term relationship with ABC and because he is absorbing some of the costs himself, he is probably the only producer in television with the power to persuade a network to schedule this show. With “Hill Street Blues” and “L.A. Law,” his programs have won six of the last nine Emmys for best dramatic series.

At least publicly, ABC executives, who have garnered plaudits from television critics and made some strides at staving off the rapid erosion of network television audiences in recent years by offering new and unusual series such as “Twin Peaks,” are downplaying the lunacy of it all.

“This fulfilled for us the need to find programs that raised the bar a little higher, that took viewers in a completely different direction and to a completely new and different place,” said Robert Iger, president of ABC Entertainment. “I think it will take some getting used to, but viewers are saying, ‘Challenge us. Don’t give us the same old stuff.’

“When I first met Steven back when we were casting ‘Doogie Howser,’ he men tioned his desire to do a police musical,” Iger continued. “And I remember my eyebrows going up a bit, although I tried to hide that, and I thought, ‘Well, somewhere along the line I’m going to have to deal with this crazy thing.’ But when Steven came in officially to pitch the series, it was not nearly as weird or crazy or off-putting as one might expect. It was intelligently laid out. His approach was direct. He knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish.”

Bochco cooked up the notion for “Cop Rock” seven years ago when someone suggested that he take “Hill Street Blues” to Broadway. Though that never happened, Bochco said that he was enticed by the idea of those characters moving around in a musical context. The high melodrama of the policeman’s world, those visceral, emotional stories, Bochco said, seemed perfectly suited for a musical translation.

“And I just thought, ‘Well, gee, why can’t you do a musical drama on television?’ They do it in the theater all the time. We’ve accepted that. People pay good money to see that.”

Gregory Hoblit, who shepherded the production of “Hill Street Blues” for five years and directed the pilot episodes of Bochco’s “L.A. Law” and “Hooperman,” said that when Bochco first broached the idea, the director had two fears. First, given the complications of producing five original music pieces each week, could they even do it within series television’s budget and time constraints? “It sounded like we were trying to climb Mt. Everest every week,” Hoblit said.

“The other thing--my biggest fear--was that this was just going to be a bad laugh. I was familiar with ‘The Singing Detective,’ but all of those songs came out of fantasy or drug-induced states. We were attempting to come out of reality, and I was afraid we’d be in the middle of some dramatic scene and we’d suddenly break into song and people would just say, ‘Oh please. This is stupid, it’s silly, it’s not at all believable. Harry, change the channel already.’ ”

Bochco was relentless, however. He persuaded Randy Newman, the acclaimed pop singer/songwriter, to write the five songs for the pilot plus the title sequence, and Newman’s association with the project, Bochco said, definitely helped nudge the network into green-lighting it. He persuaded William M. Finkelstein, former supervising producer of “L.A. Law,” to write the pilot with him. (Finkelstein is now the show’s supervising producer.) And he persuaded Hoblit, now the show’s co-executive producer and the man trusted to oversee the production, to direct the pilot--just to see, Hoblit said, if it was possible.

Shot in 15 days, nearly twice the time alloted now to the production of subsequent episodes, the hourlong pilot convinced Hoblit, who had never directed music before, that they could do it.

But the pilot, which kicks off the series Sept. 26, is not the definitive “Cop Rock” episode, according to both Bochco and Hoblit. Some of the songs, especially an opening rap number and a concluding ballad, which portrays a crack addict selling her baby for $200, are integrated into the story fairly well. But others seem to stop the story dead.

Both Bochco and Hoblit said that they learned many lessons from the pilot and believe that the second and third episodes are better. “If I knew then what I know now, I’d do a lot of things differently,” said Hoblit, who also directed the second episode. “The music feathers better with the story in these other shows. I’m better at it. I learned to make transitions much more gracefully. I can’t predict if people are going to change the dial or not, but I know that this is something that they can’t deny. There is nothing benign about it.”

While television is generally a collaborative medium, the process involved in creating this show, of necessity, requires an extraordinary number of hands in the pot. Bochco, Finkelstein and other writers meet first to outline the story for each episode, deciding where and what kind of songs might help push the plot along. Then they present the outline to a team of six songwriters (Randy Newman worked only on the pilot), who offer their own suggestions about styles of music and what sort of songs might be appropriate.

Then the writers retreat to their word processors to write the script and the songwriters go off to their keyboards to compose the lyrics and music. The music team then works up demos of the songs and plays them for Bochco and his writers. Then both the songs and the scripted scenes are rewritten or reconceived, sometimes several times, until they fit. No musical style is taboo.

“This is wonderful for the songwriters because music is on an equal level with everything else, not something that happens after everything else is done,” said Mike Post, the music producer and head songwriter, who has scored myriad television shows including “Hill Street Blues,” “L.A. Law” and “The Rockford Files.” “Usually in TV, if they have a scene they don’t like, you save them, and if they have a scene they do like, you just try to enhance it a little. But now they is us. We’re right out there in front. All those years of muttering under my breath are over. Now I can mutter away out loud right from the start.”

Meanwhile, Hoblit is working with his directors, trying to figure out how to stage each episode. He oversees essentially two separate production companies: one to film the action and one to record the music. Russell Clark, the choreographer, designs the dance steps and movement involved in each song the day before they shoot it. The actors are costumed, made up, coiffed and fitted with hidden microphones under their clothes. The music is prerecorded and then played back, but the majority of the singing is recorded live on the set as the camera rolls to give the scene a more authentic, more urgent sound. “It’s a little bit like going to war or preparing for the Super Bowl,” Hoblit said. “It’s a lot of fun, but it’s pretty scary because you just have to hope that everything is ready and all these people know what to do.”

“No one knows what anyone else is doing,” Haid said between takes of “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” “The music, the recording, I just have to hope it happens. It’s fun, man.”

Generally, the eight-day shooting schedule allows for two full-blown production numbers per episode. The other three songs are staged less elaborately. Considering that some three-minute MTV videos, which don’t require sound recording on the set, can take three days to film, adhering to Hoblit’s time frame is an achievement in itself.

If TV, like the sport of diving, gave points for degree of difficulty, “Cop Rock” would be OK even if Bochco and company belly-flopped every week. But when the fat lady sings, the only numbers that count are the numbers of Nielsen families this cop opera manages to lure to their sets each Wednesday against NBC’s traditional cop show “Hunter” and CBS’ new TV news drama, “WIOU.”

“I have no doubt that this works, but initially I think people are going to have to make a leap,” Bochco said. “The only question for me--and, of course, this is the $64 question--is whether the audience at some point will get used to the convention of the music as opposed to just the straight narrative they are accustomed to seeing hour after hour on television. But I think if I can get you to watch two shows, by then you’ll have seen (the musical convention) 10 times and you will begin to accept it. And if I can hook you into watching three episodes, I’m convinced you’ll be a devoted fan.”

ABC’s Iger concedes that “Cop Rock” is nowhere near a lock to succeed. But he said that he loves the show and his confidence is buoyed by the success of “Twin Peaks,” his other way-out-there series, which also tested terribly with research audiences but has thrived with mediocre ratings because it attracts a feverishly loyal contingent of advertiser-prized, young adult viewers.

Exhausted and overworked, Bochco--who is still heavily involved in “Doogie Howser” and consults on every “L.A. Law” episode--and his “Cop Rock” crew say they have never found their work more exhilarating. They believe that the excitement and novelty of this experience is bound to rub off on the audience.

“With most television, you know exactly what you are going to see, week in and week out,” Haid said. “The musical form of this guarantees unpredictability. We live with it every day when we’re shooting, and the audience will get it every week when they watch. ‘How strange. How exciting. How unusual. How horrible’--whatever they will say, some of these songs just transcend it. That’s what musical theater does. As corny as it sounds, when someone starts to sing ‘Some Enchanted Evening,’ it lifts you to that next level. And that’s really what this show will do.”