1990's Weirdest TV Show Was A Musical Crime Drama That Lasted 11 Episodes

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Even 35 years after its short-lived run on ABC, the late Steven Bochco's and William M. Finkelstein's "Cop Rock" is a tough sell. "Cop Rock" was about a group of Los Angeles police officers who traversed the city investigating crimes, arresting perps, and facing the every drama of living in the City of Angels. The cops were played by a talented ensemble that included Anne Bobby, Ronny Cox, James McDaniel, Paul McCrane, Vondie Curtis-Hall, CCH Pounder, and several others. 

The odd angle was that "Cop Rock" was also a musical, featuring several new songs — some composed by Randy Newman — in every episode. The cop characters, as well as the criminals, would sing about their pained lives of crime/crimefighting, and occasionally dance. It's a weird idea. "Live-action musical cop series" is an elevator pitch that would be turned down everywhere.

Bochco came up with the idea for "Cop Rock" after a Broadway producer offered to adapt his hit series "Hill Street Blues" into a stage musical. Bochco recalled his Broadway encounter in an oral history for the AV Club in 2016. He didn't like the idea of a "Hill Street Blues" musical, but the temerity of the project was too "audacious" to ignore. Rather than bring a cop TV show into the world of musicals, however, Bochco figured he could bring a Broadway sensibility into crime TV. He pitched the show to ABC and Bob Iger, the network head at the time, was titillated by the idea. Everyone thought the idea of a musical cop series was absurd, but stranger things have happened. The green light was flashed, and Bochco went to work. The first episode of "Cop Rock" aired on September 26, 1990. 

Then, on December 26, after only 11 episodes, "Cop Rock" was gone. Too weird to live, too rare to die. 

Actor McDaniel seemed to be skeptical at first but admitted to being a fan of "The Singing Detective," a musical noir show from England that aired in 1986. Indeed, a lot of the people who worked on "Cop Rock" — including Anne Bobby and Bochco himself — took "The Singing Detective" as proof that a hard-boiled genre could blend with a musical format. Unlike "The Singing Detective," which mostly features performances of old standards, "Cop Rock" was going to feature all-new music. 

Here's the thing. "Cop Rock" kind of worked. One might have seen its musical numbers passed around online and giggled at their archness. The most notorious song was probably "Baby Merchant," performed by Dennis Cockrum. In the context of the show, Cockrum plays a black market baby trafficker, and he sings a bleak song about his business to a couple he doesn't know are undercover cops. It actually plays perfectly for the story. Then, later in the episode, the teen mother who is trying to sell her baby, played by Kathleen Wilhoite, sings a song about the Sandman to her child, and it's heartbreaking. 

Other songwriters on the show included Donny Markowitz who, at the time, had just won an Oscar for writing "(I've Had) the Time of My Life" from "Dirty Dancing" (he beat the 007 song "The Living Daylights") as well as Greg Edmonson, Ron Bousted, and Brock Walsh. Bochco recalls the production to be a "complete clusterf***," as he was working with so many scriptwriters and songwriters in conjunction. He said: 

"These story meetings would be a dozen people! But as we would work through our stories, we'd ask the songwriters to identify which scenes they thought they could translate musically, because we wanted the songs as much as possible not just to be songs but to actually advance the story." 

If nothing else, "Cop Rock" was ambitious. 

No one could accept the "Cop Rock" concept, however. A musical cop show was just too weird for most audiences, and it was canned pretty quickly. 

It didn't deserve it. "Cop Rock" is only mocked for its concept, but actually functions perfectly well in execution. The ordinary melodrama of a cop procedural is actually emphasized by the music, making real-life issues like police violence, racism, crime, drugs, desperation, and human trafficking feel more emotionally immediate. 

In the show's intended final episode (they aired out of order), the showrunners had known they were being canceled, so they decided to make it count. The entire cast sang a self-aware song called "We'll Rise Again," which was preceded by a conversation between (the consistently coiffed) Cox and Curtis-Hall about how few songs they got to sing during the show's brief run. They exited the office and met the cast, out of costume, and they all sang together. Actor Mick Murray said that the song was an awesome effort. "Hey, you know what?" he said, "F*** it. We tried!"

As for Bochco, he understood how notorious "Cop Rock" has always been and knows that it has a reputation as one of the weirdest failures in TV history. But he doesn't seem to care. He felt he had put something astonishing together and had no shame about it. As he put it: 

"I'm sorry it didn't work, but I've never been ashamed of it or embarrassed by 'Cop Rock.' You know, if you're a baseball player and you get a base hit three times out of 10, and you do that for 20 years, you're going to be in the Hall Of Fame, but you're still gonna strike out sometimes. That's inevitable. But at least I went down swinging!" 

"Cop Rock" is not on streaming, but it was released on DVD in 2016. It may be worth the purchase price.