Hailing an Unsung Heroine

Diane Russell leaves “NYPD Blue” with the same quiet dignity that has made her one of television’s most finely drawn characters.

The self-effacing police detective, so superbly played by Emmy Award winner Kim Delaney, doesn’t go out in a hail of bullets, nor is she whisked away by a besotted billionaire. A week ago, a witness she spent 24 hours guarding gave Russell some unsolicited advice: It was time to move on. All that remains is to say goodbye, which she’ll do with typical restraint in Tuesday night’s episode.

Yet it would be criminal if the simple, fitting end of Russell’s six season tour of duty with the 15th Precinct went unheralded. In 1998, Jimmy Smits, who played Russell’s husband, left the show, and the uproar was so tremendous that you’d have sworn there had been mass weeping in the streets. Yes, yes, poor Bobby Simone died in his prime, felled by a swift and egregiously unjust heart ailment. But Russell’s less histrionic departure is also sad. Let us now salute a rather unsung heroine.

Russell first appeared at the end of “NYPD Blue’s” second season. A former vice cop with undercover experience, she was meant to be a love interest for Simone who would come and go in a four-episode story arc. Simone was still mourning his wife’s death from cancer, a tragedy that occurred in the show’s prehistory. He wasn’t ready to fall in love again, but even when scripted, romance can sometimes be as inconveniently timed as it is powerful.

Co-creators and executive producers Steven Bochco and David Milch were as thunderstruck as Simone, albeit for a different reason. The characters Milch writes seem to connect via their vulnerabilities more than their strengths. “Simone was a collector of birds, wounded and otherwise,” says Milch, “and he was most comfortable in relationships as a nurturer.” Along came Russell, an alcoholic, a tough cookie with a baffling inability to commit. Both the match and the actors’ chemistry were so strong it would have been foolhardy to quickly extinguish them.

While Simone was intrigued by the mysterious, dark waters that churned beneath Russell’s guarded surface, Bochco and Milch saw another rare quality. In Delaney they’d found a beautiful woman who projected no vanity. “What struck us all is we had a gorgeous woman who was totally believable as a cop,” Bochco says. “She’s uniquely credible as someone with a blue-collar job.”

Beauty comes in the room with many actresses, then lingers like a phantom. As lovely as she is, Delaney arrives unaccompanied, and behaves as if she’s unaware that her features are perfectly symmetrical, her complexion luminous or her coloring stunning. She doesn’t dislike her looks. The whole subject of her genetic gifts is simply beside the point, an attitude Russell understands.

In a recent episode, Russell’s date picked her up in the squad room at the end of a long day. She jumped up to go out for dinner, not stopping to comb her hair or freshen her lipstick. Such telling moments can be planned, but Delaney’s ability to make Russell’s lack of self-consciousness consistently natural has been one of the subtle joys of her performance.

She’s been aided by a serviceable wardrobe of dumb suits that fit in an off-the-rack way. Off-camera Delaney chooses unfussy, but more flattering, clothes. She smiles more than her alter ego, and none of the lines that the show’s harsh lighting exaggerates are visible on her face. “They light for the set, not to make me look good,” she says. “But I don’t think about looking good. Of course you want to, but I think about the character first. And I don’t have much patience in the hair and makeup chair.”

Delaney has given Russell a slight New York accent that’s just declasse enough. One of the downsides of the media exposing celebrities to the public 24/7 is that it sometimes makes it harder for an audience to accept an actress portraying a woman who’s never ridden in a limo. It shouldn’t be noteworthy that Delaney convincingly played a cop who earns less in a year than she does in a week. Yet many small-screen divas couldn’t pull that off.

So many women on television seem picked from a catalog of awful female stereotypes. Sitcoms and dramas offer the ditzy dame, the femme fatale, the hapless victim, the wacky slut, the earth mother, the crusading madonna or, that modern favorite, the complex smart chick--always unlucky in love. Russell was none of the above.

On “NYPD Blue,” a crime must always be solved. The show can’t just wander off to deal with the problems of its regular characters, any more than real people can freeze-frame their professional lives while they cope with personal crises. It’s a series about police, so character details hover in the margins of its stories. Within that context, Russell became a flawed model of a dedicated working woman.

“Being female was secondary to being professional for her,” Bochco says. “This was a character who had to maintain a real, professional demeanor in the face of powerful individual issues, and that created a very interesting tension.”

Russell treated both her mistakes and acts of heroism as no big deal. On good days and bad, she’d just do her job. She wasn’t an automaton, but she controlled her feelings with a coiled intensity. A master of understatement, Delaney conveyed much with only her eyes.

When “NYPD Blue” debuted in 1993, its producers sought to bring some of the frankness that cable TV allowed to a network show. This meant, when appropriate, including some nudity, incorporating more raw language, and showing violence that hadn’t been sanitized. In that more permissive atmosphere, Russell’s comfort with her sexuality was clear. Her fundamental goodness surfaced often, but purity wasn’t required of an active cop. To someone who faces life and death daily, sleeping with the wrong co-worker doesn’t qualify as a serious blunder. Without being coy or smarmy, Det. Russell proved to be the right woman to present sex in a refreshingly adult way.

“The character is brave, even in her weaknesses,” Milch says. “And Kim is so amazingly game. Vanity is one manifestation of fear. It’s a need to be overprotective of the self--to project the self only in a certain light. The corollary of that is that the self needs to be protected, because taken on her own terms, the self is inadequate. Russell is always unapologetically herself. Speaking as a man, there is nothing hotter than that.”

Delaney is the seventh major cast member to leave the series. Bochco says, “She’s a real television star. By virtue of the design of ‘NYPD Blue,’ we knew there would never be a legitimate way to focus on her. To a significant degree, she was an untapped resource.”

So he created a show for her. ABC has ordered 13 episodes of “Philly,” which centers on Delaney as a criminal defense attorney. The new series could be on the fall schedule.

As the detective squad’s members were fired, promoted or transferred, Russell and Andy Sipowicz, played by Dennis Franz, endured. Equally cautious with their intimacies at work, the respect they have come to share is so profound that if you listen carefully during Tuesday night’s show, you can hear the sound of Sipowicz’s heart breaking as she walks away.

Russell and Sipowicz have both been around long enough to overcome alcoholism, lose professional partners and beloved spouses. In addition, Sipowicz’s first-born was murdered, then the detective survived prostate cancer and his young son’s health scare. Russell confronted incest in her past, helped one parent get away with killing the other and decided to become a mother, only to suffer a miscarriage.

Sipowicz’s list of traumas is so melodramatic that critics have likened him to Job. Milch takes the comparison as a compliment, and employs it to illuminate the secret of Russell’s appeal.

“She has always been brave in a way that Sipowicz has not,” he says. “Unlike Job, she never cursed God. Russell is a character who has lived with God. She accepts her condition. And she has, therefore, the motions of grace.”

* “NYPD Blue” airs Tuesday nights at 10 on ABC. The network has rated this week’s episode TV-14-L-V (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with special advisories for coarse language and violence).