Like components of the college curriculum, the major cop dramas of the past decade represent three different ways of seeing the world. NYPD Blue is policing as social science, fixated on alcoholism, racism, whateverism. Law and Order? Hard science, with its brass-tacks forensic empiricism.
And Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson's Homicide was humanities, a character-driven mix of philosophy, religion and Dostoyevsky. Unsurprisingly, then, it was the first department to lose its budget, getting axed at nbc last spring. Now writer-creator Fontana says he and Levinson intend The Beat (UPN, debuts March 21, 9 p.m. E.T.) to delve even deeper into...
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