Numbers add up for ‘NYPD Blue’

Thirty-seven.

That’s the number of profanities allowed each week on the Emmy Award-winning series “NYPD Blue.” And at that, only the mildest were uttered. It was not until the current season that stronger epithets were heard.

The profanity count is a bit of trivia that surprised star Dennis Franz, whose hard-nosed Det. Andy Sipowicz spews most of the 37 off-color phrases in every episode.

Franz learned about the magic number while watching a retrospective documentary on the enjoyable new DVD set of the first season of the groundbreaking series. “NYPD Blue” returns to ABC’s Tuesday lineup tonight after being preempted for several weeks by the “reality” series “The Family,” coverage of the war in Iraq and a Barbara Walters special.

“It was interesting to hear Steven Bochco talking about the early stages of how he had to negotiate the number of words,” Franz says of the co-creator and executive producer. “They don’t know how they came up with the number 37, but it was the number they agreed upon. You know, it was a big risk that ABC was taking at the time, and it was a huge payoff for them and it continues to be a high payoff for them.”

Controversy swirled around “NYPD Blue” when it premiered in the fall of 1993 because of its frank language, adult situations and nudity. These days, though, audiences barely raise an eyebrow over the profanity or when one of the stars doffs his or her duds. But Bochco admits that a few months ago one nude scene did “kick up a little dust storm” -- the scene revolved around Charlotte Ross’ character taking off her clothes in the bathroom for her shower only to be caught au naturel by boyfriend Sipowicz’s young son, Theo. “That sort of got people’s attention a little,” Bochco says, laughing. “But the republic never falls, and life goes on.”

Franz found it fascinating to watch the episodes from the first season “and look at what we are doing now. It’s a different show. It’s decidedly different, and it’s taken many turns over the years.”

It’s so different that only Franz remains from the first episode of the first season. In the first season, David Caruso, now of “CSI: Miami,” played the understanding, sympathetic Det. John Kelly, who was partnered with Sipowicz, then battling the bottle. Sherry Stringfield of “ER” played Kelly’s estranged wife, Laura; Amy Brenneman of “Judging Amy” was patrolwoman Janice Licalsi, who falls for Kelly. And even David Schwimmer from “Friends” shows up in three of the first episodes as an ill-fated attorney.

Bochco says the periodic turnover of cast, producers and writers has kept the series from becoming stale. “All that contributes to new voices, fresh energies, different kinds of relationships in the mix of the squad room. Every time a character leaves and a new character comes in, it changes the chemistry and changes the relationships. It allows you the opportunity to reveal the new characters in broader terms that you can’t with the older characters because you have been there with them.”

Plus the series has never lost its heart and soul: Franz.

“It seems to be if Dennis goes, that is the show,” Bochco says. “It’s not ‘NYPD Blue’ anymore without him. He remains a constant throughout.”

Bochco also credits co-creator and former executive producer David Milch for “exploring significant social and cultural issues within the framework of the show. Then when David kind of burned out a little bit he moved on, and I interjected myself to a greater degree than I had for several years and sort of brought a new generation of workers who have their own take on things.”

Franz says that Bochco has always been cautious when he introduced new members.

“He just knows when something is wrong and the chemistry is right and when it’s not right,” says the actor. “He’s very selective about introducing new characters and he watches to see that there is chemistry and there is something happening. If there isn’t, subtly he’ll find a way to make that disappear and something else will replace it until he has that chemistry working again.”

Franz speaks from experience, having long been one of Bochco’s favorites, playing two roles on the producer’s “Hill Street Blues,” as well as his series “The Bay City Blues” and “Beverly Hills Buntz.”

Milch, who left the series after the seventh season, says he finally had enough distance from the show to appreciate what they accomplished in the first season. The DVD set gave him the opportunity “to take that look back to see the material as a body of work rather than a series of individual moments, which is really the one way when you are doing a show that you keep even a small portion of your sanity -- that is to take each day as it comes and do what you can that day and move on.

“But you never really get the distance to see the larger themes of the work deploying themselves over the course of a group of episodes. The truth is that is what we were working toward was to have really those first seven years at one level, to see them as a whole and to see the work of each year in that context.”

Though the popular detective series was groundbreaking, says Bochco, “I don’t think ‘NYPD Blue’ really paved the way for a more open form of storytelling from a language point of view and from a sexual point of view. I think TV sort of carved out a niche for ‘NYPD Blue’ and then everybody sort of worked around that. I don’t know of any show on television that, week in and week out, functions with the same template for language and sexuality that ours does.”

Bochco says it’s not the writers and producers who have become timid, it’s the networks. “I think advertisers are always nervous because they are not in the business of sponsoring controversy; they are in the business of selling soap.

“The networks have become far more faint of heart than they used to be. I think that’s an inevitable consequence because of vertical integrations where you have virtually the entire production pipeline under one umbrella and that one umbrella is usually a huge publicly traded corporate entity that functions powerfully on a sort of a quarterly mentality.

“That is often not the kind of approach to television that fosters creativity or long-term commitment to projects that need nurturing.”

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‘NYPD Blue’

Channel: KABC Channel 7.

When: Tonight at 10.

Rating: The network has rated tonight’s episode TV-14LV (may not be suitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for coarse language and violence).

Also on the air: Repeats from previous seasons on TNT and Court TV.

What Else: Season 1 of the series is available on DVD from Fox Home Entertainment, $60.

Dennis Franz...Andy Sipowicz

Henry Simmons...Baldwin Jones

Gordon Clapp... Greg Medavoy

Mark-Paul Gosselaar...John Clark

Charlotte Ross...Connie McDowell

Esai Morales...Tony Rodriguez

Bill Brochtrup...John Irvin

Jacqueline Obradors...Rita Ortiz

Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon...Valerie Haywood