Off duty but on camera

Outside, Manhattan temperatures had plunged into a frigid zone. Inside a sprawling turn-of-the-century Upper West Side church on a January Monday, Richard Dreyfuss and Rosie Perez were steaming things up on top of a shabby bed, playing a cop and a prostitute, respectively, as they rehearsed a scene for the new PBS drama “Cop Shop.” The crew was having fun with the locale -- a church all decked out as a brothel! -- but for the producers of “Cop Shop,” the set location was merely an inexpensive option with the space they needed for their unusual drama experiment. Unlike the usual police drama, with shootouts and action scenes, “Cop Shop” consists of two 45-minute episodes exploring the off-duty lives of New York police officers. They were designed to be shot as television once was, in single takes, with no break in the action.

One episode, “Blind Date,” follows Dreyfuss’ character, Det. Leonard Manzo, as he visits the brothel, his first-ever sober visit, and falls into a conversation about religion with Perez’s prostitute, who goes by the name of Heaven. The other episode, “Fear,” starring Blair Brown (“The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd”) as a precinct commander and Jay Thomas as a detective, focuses on the buildup of emotions at a community meeting between the police and local residents to talk about a series of neighborhood rapes. Both air tonight. If enough people tune in, PBS envisions that “Cop Shop,” produced by Los Angeles public station KCET, could become a recurring series.

If it does, it will have to compete in a crowded, rich marketplace for police dramas on television. In addition to the fancy camerawork and action scenes of CBS’ top-rated, ever-expanding “CSI” franchise, and the steady formula of NBC’s “Law & Order” spinoffs, HBO’s “The Wire” has found fans for its intricately detailed relationships, as has FX for the dirty, violent cops who populate “The Shield.”

But Dreyfuss -- who not only agreed to act in the project but also to serve as an executive producer along with David Black, the creator -- thinks the PBS show’s in-depth story structure and attempts to re-create reality will set it apart.

Black developed the project after working with Sidney Lumet, a veteran of the early days of live television, on A&E;’s “100 Centre Street.” But Dreyfuss insisted that “Cop Shop” is not a “ ‘50s homage.” By filming in real time, “we gain a freedom of writing” that allowed it to move beyond “plot and slick cinematography.” For an actor, he said, “Cop Shop” is “a bastard, a hybrid.” Movies are shot in bits and pieces, out of sequence, and as an actor “you approach it in a way that has no sense of the wholeness of it,” Dreyfuss said. “You don’t own that experience.” Most television series are similar, he added, although an actor at least has his or her character to identify with each week. And live theater is subject to the whims of each night’s audience.

“Cop Shop” is designed to tap into the best of each, with the emotional close-ups of television and the continuity of a live theater performance. The unusual project also attracted actors such as Rita Moreno, who plays the whorehouse madam.

Mary Mazur, KCET’s head of programming, called “Cop Shop” an “experiment designed to connect the emotion on stage with an audience sitting in a dark room. It is capitalizing on lessons learned early in television, about the dynamic quality you can get in a performance, using contemporary techniques.”

“You play it out like a play, but the camera is there to enhance things,” said Joe Cacaci, who directed “Fear.” Three cameras were shooting each episode, including two hand-held cameras. Each episode was shot three times through. With no stopping and starting, every actor and camera crew step was choreographed precisely in advance.

Cacaci called the process “harrowing.” Dreyfuss likened it to “a great tennis match ... and when it was over, we were three feet off the ground.” In one way, “Cop Shop” competes with commercial television: Its language is gritty enough that PBS decided to bleep out some words, in order to stay on the right side of the Federal Communications Commission’s tightened attitude toward indecent speech. Dreyfuss and Black weren’t happy but went along.

“In a show about life in a whorehouse, separating out a line about [oral sex] from lines about lubricants, pornography, drugs and deviance might seem odd or silly or more revealing about the censors than the censored,” Dreyfuss told the Television Critics Assn. in July, adding that “it is inescapably censorship under guidelines imposed after the fact by those who are in temporary political power.” Black told the same group that he thinks the public should be free to “tune in or tune off as they wish,” if the language offends them, noting “we believe the language is appropriate to the subject matter of these episodes.”

PBS picked up the project after it was abandoned by cable’s A&E;, when that network decided to move away from original drama. At $800,000 an episode, it’s much less expensive than the $2 million or more that a standard TV drama costs. Six more scripts are ready if PBS decides to keep it going as a series.

It remains to be seen whether contemporary TV audiences will be drawn to “Cop Shop’s” more measured pace. “I don’t know the answer,” Dreyfuss said. “But I do know there are millions of people out there who hate what television is developing into and would love to see something new, would love someone to guide them there. Hopefully we’ll be able to do that.”

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‘Cop Shop’

Where: KCET, PBS

When: 9-10:30 tonight.

Rating: TV-MA-LSV (may be unsuitable for children under 17, with advisories for coarse language, sex and violence)

Part I: “Fear”

Blair Brown...Precinct Cmdr.

Francis Harding

Richard Dreyfuss...Det. Leonard Manzo

Michole Briana White...Debra Ganier

Jay Thomas...Det. Moe Diamond

Part II: “Blind Date”

Richard Dreyfuss...Det. Leonard Manzo

Rita Moreno...Mary Alice

Rosie Perez...Heaven

Executive producers David Black, Richard Dreyfuss, Joe Cacaci. Writer “Fear,” David Black. Director “Fear,” Joe Cacaci. Writer “Blind Date,” Robin Shamburg. Director “Blind Date,” Anita Addison.