Actually Never

Been a while. I haven’t done a whole lot of new-to-me things lately, and the ones I have didn’t fit here.

But then there’s Cop Rock.

I blame John Oliver for this. You can blame John Oliver for many people watching Cop Rock, as a clip shown on Last Week Tonight sent enough people (myself included) to Shout! Factory’s website to order the DVDs that they ran out and had to make more.

I needn’t have bothered; the whole series is on YouTube. But at the risk of spoiling my review, I don’t regret my purchase.

What I knew:

Cop Rock, famously, has a reputation for being a terrible idea, poorly executed and quickly canceled. It’s a weekly cop show musical (!) by Steven Bochco, creator of the much more successful NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, and L.A. Law. But Cop Rock wasn’t Bochco’s only wild swing; Doogie Howser, M.D., was one of his, as was Capitol Critters. The Wikipedia description of Capitol Critters makes it sound awful and makes me want to watch it, so I’m just going to leave this here for myself for later.

What I know:

Sometimes you hear about bad things and then they turn out to be not great, sure, but not THAT bad. Maybe they’re actually pretty decent but were ahead of their time and the audience wasn’t ready for them. I haven’t seen it since it was new to home video, but I remember thinking that Last Action Hero deserved better than its reputation.

This isn’t that. Cop Rock lives up to the hype. Except it’s not hype. Or up. It lives down.

I’m not anti-musical by default. I know some of you are. If so, you’ll hate this particular musical more than most. But I don’t have an issue with “people will just sing at times here.”

The music – written by Randy Newman! I did not know this going in! – is… not great. I can live with the dated sound and production – this show is 30+ years old now. But there are these weird tonal shifts between seriousness and silliness throughout the show and the music makes it worse. A single mother sells her baby to get money for drugs and to give him a shot at a better life, then the buyer introduces himself to the prospective adoptive parents with that clip featured on Last Week Tonight, singing “I’m a baby merchant, Tots ‘R’ Us.” Something dramatic would happen and I’d think “we’d better get an inappropriate song about this” and we often DID and that made it fun to watch, sure. But hard to take seriously.

Bochco’s L.A. Law was also prone to silliness throughout its run. Wasn’t there something with a jury of Homer Simpsons? It would take me months, but L.A. Law might be one to rewatch. I was young (10-17) during its original run and haven’t seen it since, but I remember liking it enough. Especially when that mean broad ate it down the elevator shaft hahahahahahaha suck it Rosalind

I looked up the spelling of her name and learned that episode is called “Good to the Last Drop” and I just cackled.

(I bet if I watched L.A. Law now, I’d think she was the only sensible person at the whole firm.)

ANYWAY.

Like many shows of its time, you deal with some weird standards on Cop Rock. You can show people getting shot, but blood isn’t allowed. There’s no cursing stronger than “ass,” but there are several hard-R N-bombs that are jarring to a modern audience. I get that they were supposed to be jarring then too, but still.

The ending of Cop Rock is pretty famous. But I didn’t know it, and I’m so glad I didn’t know it. You could have given me a hundred tries and I’d have never guessed it. And as I’m sitting there dumbstruck, the credits roll and one of the singing cops from the final episode was a pre-fame Sheryl Crow.

If you hate musicals, you’ll hate this. If you hate “so bad, it’s good,” you’ll hate this. It’s not misunderstood or a hidden gem. It’s not worthy of a critical reappraisement. But it’s fun as heck in its own way.