Henrietta Hay's Column

I watched NYPD Blue last night. In spite of all the protests that preceded it, my life did not change noticeably as a result. What's the big deal? The only basic difference that I noticed between it and three or four other "shoot 'em ups" on the tube every night was that it was well done, skillfully photographed, well acted and the character development was far superior to that on most TV shows.

NYPD Blue had a lot of the feel of my old favorite, Hill Street Blues. The language was a little bluer, but still more discreet than that of most of the teenagers I know. And yes, it was very violent, but for somebody who has lived through Gunsmoke, Miami Vice and the Saturday morning cartoons, it was not a surprise. The nudity that figured so highly in the horrified and indignant publicity about the show involved a couple of very fleeting, shadowy glimpses of areas of the human body not usually displayed on prime time television, but if you had blinked at the right moment you would have missed them.

Law enforcement is a hard, gritty business and involves things that most of us would prefer not to know about. But for some reason or other, the American public is fascinated by it as an entertainment form.

My own favorite form of escape literature is the murder mystery. The bloody corpse in fiction simply doesn't affect me personally because it's just a story. The "good gal" (I like the books with female detectives) always catches the villain, whom I have learned by reading to call the perp.

People love police stories on the screen, any screen. I can't begin to count the cop shows that have been filmed over the years for movies and TV, but billions of dollars and a lot of careers have been made from them. They too are just stories, which real police officers probably think are pretty ridiculous. After all, the TV alternative is sappy sitcoms with deafening, raucous laugh tracks or so-called "based on real life" melodramas. At least in the mysteries the good guys usually win.

I'm just as frightened as anybody about the violent state of society today. Kids carrying guns to school, sometimes with the consent or even encouragement of their parents, gang warfare, drive-by shootings, domestic violence -- all of these things have to be stopped some way.

But I don't think that TV content can be blamed for all of them. For better or worse and for chiefly economic reasons, TV reflects society rather than leading it. The hours and hours that kids spend glued to the tube when they could be reading or playing and/or doing creative things cause more damage than the content. Those parents who do try to control their childrens' viewing habits can't rely too heavily on the various rating systems of TV and movies.

A few days before NYPD Blue, my Saturday night movie-watching pals and I saw "Mississippi Masala." This is a R rated movie. We seldom watch R's because there is usually a ten year old in the house. But I wish she had seen this one. It involved the love between an east Indian girl who had been raised in Africa, and a young black man in rural Mississippi. It was a plea for racial understanding and contained not a single dead body or four-letter word. The only possible explanation for the R rating was one fleeting, shadowy glimpse of a breast which no sane person could call nudity. One does wonder about the standards of censorship in the entertainment industry.

I have always been interested in the fact that in general the worst kind of violence is accepted as entertainment and sex is considered censurable. I think it was Jack Nicholson, the master of the truly scary movie, who commented that when a breast is kissed, the movie is rated X, but when a breast is hacked off with an ax it is only an R.

NYPD Blue is another cop show, better than most. I don't especially recommend it for kids, but I don't think it is cause for panic. What we need is more discriminating viewers.