‘Division’ Takes Up Where ‘Cagney & Lacey’ Left Off

Decked out in black leather, former “Facts of Life” punk Nancy McKeon is toting a handgun in an alley behind a downtown Los Angeles tenement. But unlike your typical child-star-gone-wrong, this gainfully employed actress is not here to score some crack. Rather, McKeon is shooting a chase scene for her sexy new cop drama, “The Division,” a series something like HBO’s racy “Sex in the City,” only with bullets and billy clubs substituted for cosmopolitans and Manolos.

Created by Deborah Joy LeVine, the force behind “Lois and Clark” and “Any Day Now,” “The Division” (previously known as “City Lights,” “Shades of Blue” and “Hearts of the City”) explores the professional and personal lives of four female homicide detectives and their tough-lady boss in the San Francisco Police Department. A fan of “Cagney & Lacey,” LeVine had long wanted to create a show about female police officers.

“I thought it would be a great way to show how far women have progressed in our society,” says LeVine. “In ‘Cagney & Lacey’ it was sort of a strange thing to see two women on the street, and now it’s not.”

Joining McKeon is an ensemble of actresses with an impressive track record of taking on heavies and kicking criminal butt. Bonnie Bedelia--who survived terrorists as Bruce Willis’ beleaguered wife in the first two “Die Hard” films--plays police captain to her homicide squad: Tracey Needham (David James Elliot’s partner during “JAG’s” first season), Lisa Vidal (stolen away from NBC’s “Third Watch”) and big-screen staple Lela Rochon Fuqua--who held her own alongside diva extraordinaire Whitney Houston in 1995’s “Waiting to Exhale,” another story about four complicated women.

But Rochon Fuqua says the relationships among the women of “The Division” are far more strained--an aspect that is reflected in the double-entendre title. “The women in ‘Waiting to Exhale’ loved each other and were really good friends,” notes Rochon Fuqua, who was most recently featured in Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday.” “The women in ‘The Division’ are really competitive; they don’t trust each other. They’re not even sure if they quite like each other, which makes for a lot of conflict.”

In addition to a weekly caseload, each of the characters is saddled with a burden to confront in her personal life. “I like portraying women that have real flaws,” says LeVine, who’s given Capt. Kate McCafferty (Bedelia) a volatile relationship with her grown daughter and a potentially explosive affair with a much younger D.A. Angela Reide (Rochon Fuqua) is troubled by an obsessive fear of passing on the breast cancer that killed her mother and grandmother to a baby she will soon learn she is expecting (to accommodate Rochon Fuqua’s real-life pregnancy). Magda Ramirez (Vidal) must fight her growing sexual attraction to her married partner, while Candace “C.D.” De Lorenzo (Needham) will have to decide whether to end her marriage to a philandering husband.

Real-Life Research for the Roles

But LeVine has been most brutal to McKeon’s deeply disturbed Jinny Exstead--a boozing detective (not unlike Sharon Gless’ Chris Cagney) with a naughty little secret. Jinny, as she describes herself in the opening scene of the pilot, is a big “slut.”

“Her disease is progressing and the alcohol is exacerbating [other addictions],” explains McKeon, chowing down on ribs during a break in filming. “She basically grew up with a father and two brothers. So if you look at the way I act, I act like a man.”

LeVine promises that Jinny’s addictions will not be quickly resolved or whitewashed. “She will eventually wind up in the gutter someplace saying, ‘I’ve got to change my life,’ ” says LeVine, crediting Lifetime for allowing her to “make it gritty, make it tough and push the envelope.”

To bring some authenticity to their roles, the principals sat down with four real-life San Francisco female homicide detectives. While Rochon Fuqua found the observations “really interesting,” McKeon was just plain bored: “I was on call with them, but that night they didn’t get any calls.”

Anxious for some real action, McKeon aligned herself with two Los Angeles detectives assigned to the Watts division. In the process, the actress got more than she bargained for, finding herself in the midst of a high-speed pursuit of three young men suspected of carjacking an 80-year-old man’s vehicle.

“We all jammed into the squad cars and we were off going 100 miles an hour, copters overhead, sirens ablaze,” McKeon recalls of one of her all-night tours of duty. “We got up there and they had trapped the vehicle in an alleyway. There were like 10 officers with their weapons out, screaming, ‘Get out! Fall down.’ ”

Not surprisingly, McKeon’s stunt double, Heather Burton, has little to do on the set but watch McKeon perform her own jumps and tumbles. “I double for Gillian Anderson on ‘The X-Files,’ and she’s so busy and tired that she likes me to do whatever,” says Burton. “But [McKeon] wants to do her own stunts. She’s very athletic.”

A year ago, McKeon began studying shotokan karate with a 10th-degree master in Glendale as part of her search for “something that had more of a mind-body-soul connection--kind of like yoga, but a little more active.” Although LeVine has incorporated McKeon’s martial arts skills into Jinny’s character, don’t expect to see the actress executing a lot of those moves. “Our show really is driven by the characters rather than the action sequences,” says McKeon.

It was LeVine’s well-drawn characters that lured Rochon Fuqua away from a film career that was just gaining steam. That, and a desire to bring some stability to her new marriage to director Antoine Fuqua (“The Replacement Killers”), with whom she is expecting her first child in June.

“The TV show was sort of a way for my family to be together in California, but I by no means intend to give up my film career,” says the actress, who originally took a pass on the series when first approached with the pilot script last spring. “Because it’s an ensemble show we’re not carrying the weight of every episode, so they talked to me about being able to do other projects.” Committed to executive-produce and star in a Showtime film titled “The Charlotte Austin Story” about a real-life woman who lost her 13-year-old daughter in a drive-by shooting, Rochon Fuqua is already questioning how long she will remain with the show--despite having signed a five-year contract.

Both Rochon Fuqua and fellow big-screen alum Bedelia, whose last film was the 1999 Susan Sarandon tear-jerker “Anywhere but Here,” are having a difficult time adjusting to the grind of a weekly TV series. “Bonnie and I talk about how different it is,” says Rochon Fuqua. “It’s been a huge adjustment. Television’s limitations take away some of your artistry and your freedom.”

“Having to learn all those lines every week was something Lela wasn’t used to,” says LeVine. “And it’s been a little tougher for Bonnie. We’re trying to give her a little bit less so that she doesn’t have to shoot every single day.”

Should Rochon Fuqua or Bedelia choose to jump ship for a return to the big screen, LeVine is prepared to handle their departures. “The good thing about an ensemble cast is that it’s an ensemble cast,” says LeVine. “It’s almost silly to think that everyone will stay for five or six years. Especially when you have five women all over 30 and their lives are changing and they’re having children. But hopefully the scripts will remain good enough that they’ll stay for a long time.”

* “The Division” premieres Sunday on Lifetime with back-to-back episodes beginning at 9 p.m. The network has rated it TV-14-DLV (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with special advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language and violence).