Turf War

PAUL DRINKWATER/NBC
Miguel Cadena (Yancy Arias) is the rare criminal protagonist on network TV

Last fall, network tv finally broke the bulls___ barrier: ABC's NYPD Blue got network permission to use the standard vulgarity for cattle feces. And a remarkable thing happened or rather, didn't. Local affiliates were not deluged with angry calls. ABC did not lose millions of dollars of advertising. The move practically begged for the eternal question, "Has TV gone too far?" Instead, millions of viewers quietly concluded that, no, TV had gone just the right amount.

NBC's new gangster drama, Kingpin (Sundays and Tuesdays, 10 p.m. E.T., debuting Feb. 2), takes a lot of supposed risks: its depiction of drug use, its heavy violence and its protagonist, a Mexican crime lord shipping coke and crystal meth to American kids. But its greatest liability may be today's yes-you-can-do-that-on-TV culture. In the wake of R-rated, critically acclaimed and successful cable shows like HBO's The Sopranos and FX's The Shield, network TV has found audiences increasingly blase about sex and violence. This season Jack Bauer killed and decapitated a prisoner on 24, and a helicopter blade lopped off Dr. Romano's arm on E.R., while on Friends, married couple Monica and Chandler got advice on sex positions from Monica's dad. Each show enjoys high ratings and bounteous ads. Perversely, this may be bad for Kingpin, because, let's face it, when a network bravely admits that a new show may be too dangerous for TV, the danger is precisely the selling point.

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"We knew [Kingpin] would be risky and different and potentially controversial," says NBC entertainment president Jeff Zucker. "All of those things appeal to us." Risky, yes enough so that NBC ordered only six episodes. Controversial, maybe. But different? Kingpin follows Miguel Cadena (Yancey Arias), a Mob boss who prefers to think of himself as a captain-of-industry type, who gets both support and agita from a headstrong wife and who wants to shield his son from his bloody business. If you infringed this closely on one of Tony Soprano's construction scams, your head would end up in a bowling bag. Zucker downplays the comparison, saying the show was inspired by a newspaper article about the cross-border drug trade. But David Mills, Kingpin's writer-creator, acknowledges that The Sopranos' success "allowed us to imagine that a criminal could be the protagonist in an hour drama. Without The Sopranos, I would not have dared to propose the idea, and the network would not have dared to develop it."

But if Kingpin is the most obvious effort so far to see if a network can re-create hbo's success, it also raises the question of what makes an hbo success. It's not just blood, the F word and nudie shots: even if you stripped Jill Hennessy naked and had her kill men with piano wire, Crossing Jordan would still not be an hbo show. Brad Grey, who produces The Sopranos and several network series, says the difference is a strong point of view and subtle, adult storytelling. "At times that calls for looser standards and practices than the networks traditionally allow," he says. "But that's the tail wagging the dog."

On dramas like Six Feet Under, for instance, characters talk around their feelings and leave you to infer their real meaning, like people in good novels (and real life). On most network dramas, people talk like they do, well, on TV: they say exactly what they're thinking and have crystal-clear motives. Swear words and skin rarely cost viewers or ad revenue anymore, but complex stories and strong points of view are polarizing. Love-'em-or-hate-'em shows fit hbo's business model: the gleefully misanthropic Curb Your Enthusiasm is a hit for hbo because a few million people like it intensely enough to pay for it. But a network, which needs lots of eyeballs to sell to advertisers, would prefer 25 million viewers who don't dislike a show enough to change the channel. Pay-cable series also don't have to be written to accommodate commercial breaks.

The dirty secret of Kingpin is that in the episodes sent to critics, its language and violence are not much more explicit than what we've already seen on network TV. An attention-getting moment in the pilot a gangster feeds a human leg to his pet tiger is no more graphic than many scenes in CSI; there is fleeting partial nudity, but sadly for anyone hoping for a reprise of the Bada Bing club, it's an old man exposing a hint of pubic hair. The real risk it takes is that, like The Sopranos, Kingpin puts bad guys front and center. Bobby Cannavale, who plays Miguel's brother, played a paramedic for two years on Third Watch. There, he says, "by the end of an episode, everyone learned their lesson, and I was usually taught something by my partner. In this show, my character kills a few people and then has a drink or sex."

Like many hbo shows, Kingpin has attitude and edge. Those are easy. What it doesn't have is a fresh voice and fleshed-out characters who surprise you. Kingpin knows its pop history: it often recalls Traffic and larcenously mimics The Godfather's conclusion, as Miguel's visit to a church is crosscut with scenes of his rivals being rubbed out. The Sopranos uses Mob cliches too, but it overlays them with a suburban family drama; Kingpin does nothing to improve on its Mob-movie forebears, nor does it have the subtlety or layers of The Sopranos. (These might be unfair comparisons if Kingpin didn't so showily invite them.) In typical network style, Kingpin's characters let you know precisely what they're thinking, either in workmanlike soap speak or the florid language of banditos from a late-night western ("I have seen the flames of hell! I have swam through rivers of blood!"). The Mexican characters speak a thickly accented English laced with Spanish--"Gracias!" "De nada!"--as if to remind us we are not in Milwaukee.