Trivia / NYPD Blue

• Acting for Two: Dennis Franz plays himself and, in a dream, his father in "I Have a Dream."
• Actor-Shared Background: Dennis Franz, like Sipowicz, is a Vietnam veteran.
• Cast the Expert:
  • John F. O'Donohue (Detective Eddie Gibson) was a real-life N.Y.P.D. Detective before retiring to pursue an acting career.
  • Consultant and former New York detective Bill Clark was seen a few times as a cop.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Detective John Kelly was originally named Flinn, and intended for Jimmy Smits, who turned down the role. Smits later played Kelly's replacement, Detective Bobby Simone.
• Dueling Shows: with Homicide: Life on the Street, another gritty, serialized Police Procedural. David Simon even wrote scripts for both shows, though he turned down a full-time gig on Blue as he preferred working in his home city of Baltimore.
  • Law & Order and its spinoffs, as well; the two frequently competed for Emmys although they aired on different nights. It appears to have been mostly a friendly rivalry, though, as the two shows shared a lot of overlapping cast members ^note for instance, Christopher Meloni had a recurring role on Blue two years before being cast in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Nicholas Turturro of Blue later appeared in several episodes of SVU and writers. The writers occasionally took friendly jabs at each other; an early Law & Order episode mentions a corrupt "15th Precinct," while the racist policeman who harasses Fancy at a traffic stop is from the "27th Precinct," aka L&O's Homicide Squad.
• False Credit: Sharon Lawrence is credited with the main cast at the start of every episode of season 4, but she only actually appears in 4 out of 22 episodes. The actress was unsatisifed with her material on Blue and took a role starring on Fired Up for NBC, but told Blue producers she would appear in any scenes they wrote for her in order to fulfill her contract. Because she was under contract as a regular and fulfilling her end of the deal, she had to be paid and credited in certain ways or fired entirely.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: The writers of the episode "Oh Golly Goth" let Pedro Pascal improvise Dio's satanic chant, which he later confirmed as simply gibberish.
• Hostility on the Set: One of television's most notorious examples. David Caruso was a headache to the showrunners and costars from Day One; Steven Bochco referred to his behavior as "cancerous" and alleged that Caruso "was the source of all the discontent [on set], and it empowered him." David Milch even had a heart attack after a particularly intense argument with Caruso. Dennis Franz and Gordon Clapp each said that while Caruso could be a charming guy off the set, during filming he became extremely competitive with his costars which created a lot of tension (on one occasion, he kicked a garbage can at Franz without warning). After the first season, Caruso famously demanded an exorbitant salary hike along with other preferential treatment, and walked off the show to try a film career after ABC refused.^note His film career quickly tanked, and Caruso struggled to find work until he was cast in CSI: Miami in 2002. Further, Amy Brenneman and Sherry Stringfield's characters were written out of the show largely because they were so closely tied to Caruso, leaving even more bitterness in his wake. Caruso himself views his behavior on Blue as an Old Shame and has tried to learn from the experience.
  Steven Bochco: "He never said it to me directly, but the simple truth was, Caruso felt he was too good for television...He wanted to be a movie star. And his plan was to alienate the writers, producers, and his fellow castmates in hopes that we would dump him from the show.”
• Real-Life Relative: Lola Glaudini played the squad's secretary, Dolores Mayo. Glaudini's father, Robert Glaudini, played Dolores's father, Jimmy Mayo.
• Recast as a Regular: Before joining the cast as Detective Connie McDowell, Charlotte Ross appeared in the fifth season as the abused wife of a cop suspected by Detective Bobby Simone and Detective Diane Russell of killing a prostitute. When Andrea Thompson left the series, Steven Bochco remembered Ross, and wrote the part of McDowell for her.
• Star-Making Role:
  • The first season made David Caruso one of the hottest stars on TV, but he let the success go to his head and left after only one season to star in the ill-fated movies Kiss of Death and Jade (the latter of which was his Star-Derailing Role).
  • The show was this for Dennis Franz, who bagged four Emmys and tons of critical praise for his iconic role as Sipowicz. It was also his last role of note - he retired when the series ended.
• Technical Advisor: Series consultant Bill Clark, later also Executive Producer, is a former New York detective Steven Bochco met and wrote the show around. Original main protagonist John Kelley's investigative style is patterned after Clark's, and Clark shares several biographical points with the other main protagonist Andy Sipowicz.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: The series was often written on set during filming due to head writer David Milch's drug use. "OK, you [Sipowitz] say this, and then you [Simone] say this in response." Actors wrote down their lines on scraps of paper in the squad room. Jimmy Smits and other actors quit over the hectic scheduling.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Richard Gant appears a few times as the desk sergeant at another precinct, then later as a municipal bus driver who witnesses a perp running away from the scene of a crime, then later as Sgt. Bill Dornan.
  • Charlotte Ross appeared in a couple of episodes in season five as a cop's battered wife before returning in season eight as Connie McDowell.
  • Silas Weir Mitchell as an abusive boyfriend in one episode, and later as a crime scene witness.
  • Richard Schiff first appeared as a Romanian immigrant suspected of terrorism, then later as an apartment superintendent murdered by one of his tenants.
  • James Pickens Jr. has a guest appearance in Season One playing a friend of John Kelly's accused of murder. In Season 7 he's brought back for a recurring role as the head of the anti-bias unit.

---