Revelations in Blue

Having struggled with addiction, he remains thoroughly committed to his work and family, while still grappling with his own inner demons.

While that description fits Andy Sipowicz, the gruff detective on ABC’s “NYPD Blue,” it also applies to the man who helped create him.

David Milch, “NYPD Blue’s” co-creator and executive producer, has lived a life nearly as colorful as any of his characters. Now, he just wants to hang around long enough to savor being at the top of his game and having survived it.

Those associated with the Emmy-winning police drama--which survived a baptism in controversy because of its standard-pushing content and aired its 100th episode earlier this month--say Milch is the soul of Sipowicz and the creative force behind one of television’s most-decorated programs. Though co-creator Steven Bochco remains the primary name identified with the show, Milch has steered the series since its first season, flanked by former New York detective Bill Clark, with whom he has forged a near-symbiotic bond.

Milch, 53, is about as happy as he can get to have reached that 100-episode milestone, having undergone multiple angioplasty procedures to clear coronary blockages shortly after the program premiered. Since then, he’s become near-obsessed with diet and exercise, without showing any willingness or desire to diminish his work load.

Characterized as “brilliant” and “complicated” by those who know him, Milch is widely recognized within the industry as one of television’s finest writers.

“He’s absolutely stark raving mad and the most brilliant guy I know. He thinks on about 20 different levels at the same time,” says Mark Tinker, a producer and director on the Tuesday night series.

“David is arguably the best television writer in town, so it was an incredible learning experience,” adds Gardner Stern, now a producer on CBS’ “Michael Hayes,” regarding his three seasons on the show. “The episodes were constantly evolving in his mind.”

Milch freely admits he has reached this point almost in spite of himself, thanks to his wife and children as well as to Bochco and Clark, all of whom have helped insulate the writer from his excesses--which earlier in life included a 10-year addiction to heroin plus problems with gambling and alcohol abuse.

Bochco, Milch says, “has sort of been responsible for creating the environment in which I can function, and that’s no mean feat on several fronts. I never have to talk to the network, and that’s enormous. There is no one in town I’m aware of who doesn’t have to do that. He fights all the fights about language and about nudity.

“It’s no accident that I was just as talented for better or worse for a lot of years and couldn’t get out of my own way. Steven has known how to create an emotional environment here where I’m comfortable.”

“Here” would be Bochco’s airy offices on the 20th Century Fox lot in Century City. Milch shares a wing of the building with Clark, where the two are serenaded by African gray parrots named Toody (after the character in “Car 54, Where Are You?”) and Scarlett (as in O’Hara), who chirp profanities in Clark’s New York accent.

That office serves as the central nervous system for “NYPD Blue” and “Brooklyn South,” the CBS series about uniformed cops that premiered last fall and recently won a People’s Choice Award. Despite that honor, the new series--after a promising start--hasn’t appeared to be a choice of many people based on its recent ratings.

Milch wears a T-shirt as he blocks out stories for both series. The walls feature pictures of his wife, Rita, and children--ages 8, 11 and 13--as well as Robert Penn Warren, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet-novelist (he wrote “All the King’s Men”) who mentored Milch at Yale.

Milch’s devotion to the two shows represents a major undertaking for someone whose health remains an ongoing concern.

“I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life this year,” says the producer, who feels a heightened sense of urgency now that he has reached this creative pinnacle, after his share of frustrating run-ins with studios and networks earlier in his career.

“You get to the point where you’re asking yourself, ‘Well, if they weren’t [expletive] me over, how good would I be?’

“As an artist, you just want a chance to see what you can do,” he says. “I had gotten to the point, in no small part because of Steven, where I was getting to find out just how good a storyteller I was, and then I got sick. I was very sad about it--I wasn’t depressed, I was despairing.”

Milch remains a study in contradictions: Having taught creative writing at Yale before coming to Hollywood, he tosses around phrases like “provisional myth” with a professorial air that can send listeners running for a thesaurus. Yet he’s equally comfortable hanging out with cops or detailing how a detective might beat a “skel” (criminal) in order to secure a confession.

“If you’re going to work with David, you just have to get out of the way of what he does so brilliantly . . . and keep him out of the loop in areas where he’d only shoot himself in the foot,” Bochco says.

“David’s complicated--he’s a high-performance engine. You’ve got to change his plugs and his oil and baby him a little through the turns.”

“He’s got a tremendous memory--he doesn’t forget anything I ever said,” notes Clark, a bearish man who lived at Milch’s house during visits to Los Angeles the first two years he served as a consultant to the show--a role that has gradually expanded, with Clark’s personal experiences often providing the basis for episodes. “If he wanted to, he could go into my office [at the police department], catch a homicide and know what to do.”

Yet Milch has also gravitated toward the underworld--a trait he shared with his late father, Elmer, a Buffalo, N.Y., surgeon whose family had ties to organized crime.

Milch says his father (who died in 1979) was also an addict and lived such a regimented existence that any change in routine could spur irrational outbursts. The producer nevertheless warmly remembers spending time with his dad at the racetrack and has become a successful horse owner, including the champions Gilded Time and Awesome Daze, who in November won Hollywood Park’s $100,000 On Trust Handicap in record-setting time.

Though many have cited parallels between Sipowicz (played by Dennis Franz) and Milch, the writer sees more of his father in the character.

“At the beginning, I thought he was purging himself of a lot of demons--and emotions and thoughts and things--from his past through the Sipowicz character,” says Franz, a three-time Emmy winner for the role, who began his association with Milch more than a decade ago on Bochco’s earlier groundbreaking police series, “Hill Street Blues.” Franz says Milch is now “more comfortable with himself, happier--at peace in his personal life, which has allowed him to focus his energies on his work.”

“My feeling is he’s more an expression of my sense of my dad than myself, but to the extent that I reenact patterns of my dad’s personality, I guess that’s true,” Milch concedes regarding Sipowicz. Though he graduated first in his class at Yale, for example, Milch recalls passing out drunk at the ceremony.

Even in his youth Milch possessed obvious gifts as a writer, selling a novel while still in college. Yet he also grappled with addiction and other psychological “nonsense,” as he puts it, making him his own worst enemy.

“I destroyed a manuscript. There were periods when I would write the same 12 pages, word for word, every morning for more than a year. That was a lot of fun,” he says with a wry smile.

“The thing about someone who is as unstable as I am is, you feel like your nose is up against the window of normal life all the time, and you kind of ache for that. . . . I wanted to be able to earn a living such that we could start a family.” His wife didn’t want to marry him, he adds, “until I had a paying job.”

Warren nurtured Milch professionally, securing him work at Yale, where he taught for more than a decade, during those years checking into a rehab hospital to address his addiction.

In 1982, he was offered a script assignment on “Hill Street Blues” by Jeffrey Lewis, a former roommate at Yale. As a show that resembled little else on television, “Hill Street,” Lewis says, was “desperately democratic--with the emphasis on the word ‘desperate,’ because we needed people who could write.”

“I knew that you don’t get a lot of chances,” Milch says. “The first script I turned in had a lot of problems just because I had never seen a script, but I listened pretty hard. The revision that I did was very effective, so things happened very, very quickly.”

After a few years on “Hill Street,” Bochco--who had co-created the series--was forced out, leaving Lewis and Milch to run the show through its final season.

Milch’s touch could be seen when actor Michael Conrad died. Conrad’s desk sergeant Phil Esterhaus would tell his patrolmen, “Let’s be careful out there.” The replacement, played by Robert Prosky, said, “Let’s do it to them before they do it to us.”

“I felt that’s what cops feel,” Milch explains. “My job as a writer is to be true to the sensibility of the people I’m portraying. As for my own views, I’m too mercurial and unstable a sensibility to have any concrete views about anything.”

Still, the producer acknowledges understanding the “fascist sensibility” inherent in police work--”what it means,” he says, “to live in a world that is, at its extremes, the negation of everything except brute force.”

At its core, “NYPD Blue” takes a sympathetic view of the police, who are sometimes depicted violating a suspect’s rights in pursuit of justice. The show thus has a conservative streak, despite having outraged social conservatives in one sense by pressing television’s standards regarding language and nudity.

In Milch’s eyes, society wants the police to abrogate criminals’ rights and then lie about it. Because cops know they will be prosecuted if caught, they therefore tend only to trust other cops.

“Sipowicz is, for my purposes, a character who can accommodate the contradictions because his soul is good, although he’s a very violent man. . . . What our show is able to do is to exploit the dramatic possibilities of those contradictions. I try not to come down on one side or the other,” Milch says. “What I try to do is to tell stories.”

Milch’s perspective on how the police operate has been expanded by spending time with cops and, in particular, Clark. The two have grown so close that Clark--in the dedication to their book about the series, “True Blue”--said Milch has replaced his late brother, John, “in all my future plans.”

“They’re like partners. I suppose it was like that when Bill was a cop--you have partners who you trust, and they watch your back,” says Kim Delaney, who joined the show late in its second season and won an Emmy last year as Detective Diane Russell.

“I’ve internalized his sensibility so much that even when I’m not with him, I instinctively know how he would respond to a situation,” Milch says. “For a writer, that’s big, to have a second sort of self that you’re able to carry around inside you.”

Following “Hill Street,” Milch and Lewis produced a spinoff, “Beverly Hills Buntz,” starring Franz. The show failed, as did “Capital News,” an ABC series Milch co-created about a fictional Washington, D.C., newspaper. (The network had passed on a project he proposed about a Washington lobbying firm, he says, keeping only the setting.)

Milch drifted for a time, serving as a highly paid but often uncredited “script doctor” on feature films and entering into an unproductive deal with Columbia Pictures Television before reuniting with Bochco to create “NYPD Blue.” The series premiered amid enormous fanfare, with more than 50 ABC affiliates initially refusing to air the show because of concerns about its content.

While many felt Bochco calculated that such a brouhaha would inspire people to tune in--as they did in big numbers--the producer maintains that the show at first received “all the wrong kind of attention. . . . It took a year for that hysteria to die down” before people could focus on its merits.

By then, another controversy erupted regarding the departure of star David Caruso, who, craving a film career, presented the producers with a list of demands they deemed unreasonable before eventually asking to leave. Having clashed with Milch throughout the first season, the actor was released and replaced with Jimmy Smits--a change, Milch says, that has made everyone’s life easier.

Working with Bochco has liberated Milch, who sees himself foremost as a writer and notes that the entertainment industry has a way of promoting people beyond their level of competence.

“The good news is this is a guy who just wants to concentrate on the writing,” says Ted Harbert, who was president of ABC Entertainment when “NYPD Blue” premiered. “He wants to deliver his actors the best scripts that he can. . . . The reputation of television rests on guys of his talent who are willing to put their lives into the quality of their shows.”

Milch tinkers with scripts constantly, including frequent last-minute revisions.

“Sometimes we get a script and they say, ‘It hasn’t been Milched yet.’ We know that means it’s going to change,” says Delaney, whose character has also struggled with alcoholism. Tinker likens the way Milch constructs characters to “a reverse artichoke”--adding layer upon layer, week after week.

Others who have worked with him in the past note the producer has a mercurial nature--capable of tremendous generosity but also fits of anger. Sources also say he can be especially hard on writers when it comes to “Milching” their scripts.

“I don’t apologize for that, because I rewrite myself every day,” the producer says. “Writers are supposed to be grown-ups. That ‘I wrote this’ [mentality]--we don’t play any of that stuff here, and a lot of writers take offense at that. I try always to be respectful, but I won’t back off on that. My only loyalty is to the work.”

Other than Clark, Milch seldom socializes with his co-workers. He has little taste for Hollywood parties and felt uncomfortable at an extravagant bash CBS Television President Leslie Moonves hosted in September--the first such event he and his wife could remember attending during the 15 years they’ve lived in Los Angeles. (“I used to go to Steven’s parties, and he now forgives me and I don’t have to,” Milch says.)

A larger question is whether Milch, as one source put it, “wants out of Bochco’s shadow.” Milch signed a lucrative deal with Bochco in 1995 that has about 18 months remaining. Given his track record, virtually any studio would willingly bankroll Milch to produce programs under his own production banner.

“I guess I’d be dishonest to say that the thought never occurs to me,” Milch says, referring to the lesser recognition he receives. “By the same token, I’m a realist and I understand the dynamics of the town. . . . [And] I have never felt--which would be vexing--that Steven had tried in any way to claim the limelight.”

Milch adds that his tendency toward the perverse may even give him a “weird kick” about people failing to understand his contribution to the series. “I’m the last person to ask about what goes on inside me,” he says.

In addition, Milch’s brushes with notoriety haven’t necessarily been pleasant. A brief furor ensued in 1994, for example, after he was quoted as saying “I’m racist” at a writers’ workshop. Milch said the remarks were taken out of context as he explained how he could access racism inside himself in order to write the Sipowicz character.

Milch also joined 20 writers who threatened to break ranks with the Writers Guild of America during its bitter 1988 strike--a move that prompted some other members to label the splinter group “traitors.”

Beyond the two current series, Milch is writing a feature film he plans to produce with Bochco--a project he hopes to finish during the next production hiatus. Citing his own manic personality, the producer believes relaxing or any disruption of his work-laden routine could be perilous.

“I need to be working all the time,” he says, adding only half-jokingly that if he’s not home by 10, his wife “knows to start looking for me in another town.”

Though he says “NYPD” remains “still very fresh to me,” Milch nonetheless talks about eventually changing his life dramatically. He owns a home in Martha’s Vineyard and has considered heading back to Yale to teach his own children, the oldest of whom will begin college in five years.

Los Angeles, he says, has been the venue but not the source of his happiness. Yet while he doesn’t fully embrace Hollywood, Milch adds, “I sure as hell don’t turn my nose up at it. It’s gotten me a really good living. Obviously there are parts of the business that are less rewarding and are really soul-destroying, but you find that anywhere.

“I’ve been blessed, I feel, to have found someone in Steven who has been able to sort of run interference with that part of the world and let me do the work that I’m good at. You have to be very lucky in life . . . to find an environment where you can function like that. I’ve been wise enough to know that I’m supposed to stay here. I wouldn’t have been wise or strong enough to have organized my world on my own, I believe, in the way that it is now.”