Anyone watching TNT in the last month or so, either for NBA Playoff games or endless repeats of Law & Order has been subject to countless previews for its second year series "Raising the Bar."

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the preivew on youtube - so here's the idea - Steven Bochco is a god of Drama, a late 20th/early 21st century Shakespeare who portrays the law the way it is while keeping you on the edge of your seats with hairraising legal and personal battles which intersect in interesting ways. Basically, a bunch of cast members talk about the gospel of Bochco and what it means to work for him, and what you, as the viewer, will be getting by watching the show. The disembodied narrator at the beginning and ends of the commercial tell us that Bochco is the man who brought us such shows as NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues and LA Law.



However, through this lionizing of Bochco, (with plenty of credit given for three successful series - not an easy feat) a few of Bochco's less successful shows have been glossed over (along with one or two successful ones)

I've his other creations aside from the big three of NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues and LA Law , in chronology order. It's an impressively long list, so I'm slicing it into two parts.

Paris - Bochco's first series with his new production company, was, unsurprisingly a cop show - James Earl Jones starred as Captain Woody Paris, who oversaw a team of young detectives, and dealt with issues at home as well. Wikipedia claims the show was critically well reviewed, but was put up in a killer time slot on Saturday nights. The most lasting impact of the show was Jones meeting his future (and current) wife Cecilia Hart, a fellow cast member.



Bay City Blues - Airing in Fall 1983, although it sounds like it could easily be another cop show, Bay City Blues was about a minor league baseball team - young players on their way up, older players on the way down and everyone in between. It was the second Bochcho show (after Paris) to go up against Hart to Hart and lose. It starred Michael Nouri of Flashdance fame and Ken Olin of Thirtysomething fame and is perhaps most notable featuring very early roles for Dennis Franz and Sharon Stone.



Hooperman - This one actually ran two seasons, perhaps because it featured John Ritter, as, what else, but a police officer, named Harry Hooperman, and from what I can glean, the premise is more or less that he's a police officer, and he takes over his apartment building after his elderly landlady is killed, and hires what is to become his romantic interest to run it. What else happens is anybody's guess, but there were 42 episodes worth, remarkably.



Doogie Howser, MD - Ah! The biggest success story outside the big three, probably not as noted because it strays from Bochco's favorite topic of cops. You know the basic story, and of course, Neil Patrick Harris has thankfully reemerged once again as a star thanks to Harold and Kumar and How I Met Your Mother. It's worth noting that this was executively produced by two of the biggest creative minds in television over the past 25 years, Steven Bochco and David E. Kelley, leading to feelings it could have been even more successful than the modest four season run it had (They had both worked together on LA Law, but it was started by Bochco, and then run largely by Kelley).



Cop Rock - The legend itself finally arrives. Ranked 8th in a TV Guide list of the worst television shows of all time (which makes me both incredibly curious to actually see an episode, and to see what 7 shows are worse), how the idea somehow got beyond the planning stage must speak to how much weight Steven Bochco carried at the time. The title, for what it's worth, more or less summarizes the idea of the show - it's Hill Street Blues meets, well, a broadway musical, or more likely, a grade b musical television special. Wikipedia does not have nearly as much information as I would like, but it teases with lines like "Another episode had a lineup of Hispanic suspects proclaim in song "We're the local color with the coppertone skin / And you treat us like we're guilty of some terrible sin." (There was amazingly an NBC team drama/musical that debuted the same year called Hull High which naturally failed quickly and spectacularly as well - it's true that things really do come in pairs).



Civil Wars - Another legal drama a la LA Law, it focused on some New York divorce lawyers (get it? Civil Wars? Between husband and wife?) Mariel Hemingway and Debi Mazar star in this series which apparently lasted two seasons, after which it was cancelled, but Mazar's character was somehow inserted into the last season of LA Law.



Capital Critters - Bochco's foray into the world of animation turned as well as his foray into musicals. Featuring the voicework of Neil Patrick Harris and Bobcat Goldthwait among others (and of course as any show with animals must, Frank Welker), it was an oddly serious attempt to probe deeper issues through cartoon mice. The series begins with our main character mouse, Max, fleeing to Washington DC, after seeing his entire family in Nebraska murdered by exterminators while he was gathering food, and eventually he ends up mingling with other critters in the White House basement. It lasted a month and a half before being cancelled.



Murder One - Probably the most successful relative failure of Bochco's is this one, which was serial television, before it became popular again ten years later. The first season involved one major case - which led to audiences who missed episodes before the advent of DV-R to lose track of show, and an attempt to revamp the second season, making it easier to follow, and replacing original star Daniel Benzali with Anthony LaPaglia and adding future Buffy principal and 24 president DB Woodside. A handful of other well-known actors and actresses appeared in the series, including Stanley Tucci as the villain in the first season, Patricia Clarkson as the Benzali's wife, and future 24 president Gregory Itzin. After two seasons, it was done.

Much moreore in the concluding segment.