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Lesbian Characters Get Promoted on Fourth Season of NYPD Blue

During the twelve seasons that it was part of the ABC Tuesday night line-up, Steven Bochco’s NYPD Blue became known for a number of things: Emmy-winning writing and acting; language, nudity and violence that pushed network standards of the day; and an overarching narrative that took Detective Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) from a racist, alcoholic and isolated cop to a respected family man and lieutenant of his squad.

Unfortunately, NYPD Blue was not known for its multifaceted portrayals of women, or lesbians.

In the first three seasons of “NYPD Blue,” every single female member of the cast was paired romantically with a male cast member (while there were male cast members without on-screen partners), and that romance took up a significant portion of the character’s screen time. Indeed, Assistant District Attorney Sylvia Costas seemed to spend more time helping lover Andy Sipowicz through his personal crises than she did putting perps behind bars.

For gay men, it was even worse. The early years of NYPD Blue relegated gay men to occasional guest-starring roles, and frequently those roles were limited to an early appearance as a corpse. A typical second-season episode, “Don We Now Our Gay Apparel,” features the murdered co-owner of a gay bar whose body is discovered by a transsexual cabaret performer that Sipowicz (true to his character) continually refers to as a “he-she.” When asked by the detectives about any financial troubles that the bar might be having, the (straight and alive) surviving owner remarks casually, “If you’ve got a gay bar, you’ve got a bank. All those people, they want somewhere to go. Two incomes and no dependents.”

Though season three saw the introduction of gay civilian aid John Irvin (who in later years would go on to become a main cast member, albeit one without a continuing storyline), NYPD Blue still struggled with its “female trouble” in the guise of Detective Adrian Lesniack (Justine Miceli).

Lesniack is introduced in season two as a detective who transfers from the 27th precinct to get away from a controlling lover. As season three progresses, she becomes the focus of Detective James Martinez’s (Nicholas Turturro) crush. When Martinez’s partner, Medavoy (Gordon Clapp), asks if she might return those feelings, she matter-of-factly tells him that she is gay. To Medavoy’s stammering comment that he thought she had a boyfriend, and she blithely remarks, “Yeah. And now I have a girlfriend.”

Score one for the lesbians! Except not.

The audience quickly learns that Lesniack only says this to discourage Martinez because she feels uncomfortable getting involved with another detective again. The idea that Lesniack might actually be bisexual lasts all of one scene where she confesses some confusion about what exactly she does feel, and John Irvin suggests that she sit in one of the Gay and Lesbian Officers meetings.

Five episodes later, Lesniack has dismissed the alliance as “a place where I don’t belong” and shortly thereafter, she and Martinez are consummating their heterosexual relationship. Four episodes after that, Lesniack is reduced to a screaming jealous caricature, who bears no resemblance to the character that was introduced in season two, let alone a three dimensional-portrait of an actual woman that an audience might care about.

Season four, which arrives this week on DVD, brings some changes with it. Meredith Steihm (who will later go on to create, along with Dee Johnson, the Kim-Kerry storyline for ER) joins David Milch, Mark Tinker, and out-director Paris Barclay as a permanent member of the creative staff; and a new female cop, Jill Kirkendall, is introduced. In 1996 when this season first began airing, I remember hearing rumors of how “the new girl” was going to be gay. The casting of Andrea Thompson, whose biggest on-screen credit was playing Commander Susan Ivonova’s lover, Talia Winters, on Babylon 5, seemed to lend credence to those rumors.

That wasn’t exactly what happened.

Lacking the existential angst of Andy Sipowicz or the charismatic style of Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits), Greg Medavoy is the Cop as Everyman, whose problems are immediately recognizable and whose approach to policing is that it is a job for which he is only sometimes well-suited. Throughout NYPD Blue‘s run, Medavoy’s struggles “such as his season one affair with curvaceous civilian aid Donna Abandando (Gail O”Grady)– are mostly depicted as lightly comic, a welcome contrast to the frequently brooding arcs of the other characters. Season four begins on the same note, opening with Medavoy fretting about his recent weight gain and determined to do something about it.

“Moby Greg” introduces Abby Sullivan (Paige Turco), a cop in the anti-crime bureau located upstairs from the detectives” squad. She first encounters Medavoy in the gym, struggling more than a bit with the weight equipment. The scene is, in romantic comedy terms, a typical “meet cute,” only the positions are reversed. Instead of Abby being the hapless female floundering about in unfamiliar territory, she is the confident one who knows her way around the gym. She compliments a flustered Medavoy on his commitment to improving himself and off-handedly offers to work out with him sometime.

At first it seems that the Abby-Greg encounter will follow the typical NYPD Blue romantic formula in which any female character will immediately become involved with the first male cast member with whom she has a scene. Through several episodes, Greg and Abby are shown jogging and working out, her cheerful presence unwittingly encouraging Greg’s growing crush until he finally works up the nerve to ask her out to dinner.

He is thrilled by her immediate acceptance, only to be flabbergasted when she tells him that she doesn’t want to mislead him. That she is gay.

Except, as the season three Lesniack storyline demonstrates, sometimes a woman coming out to man doesn’t exactly mean she’s really gay. Martinez points out as much to a despondent Greg who feels awkward about going out to dinner with Abby now that his romantic hopes have been crushed. Nonetheless, he follows through, and discovers that Abby is just as friendly and open to him as she was before he knew she was gay. The problem “if there is one “the text seems to be saying, is Greg’s.

Medavoy’s positioning as the most “ordinary” detective in the squad allows the straight audience to identify with his bewilderment and disappointment that this woman is unavailable to him, while lesbian audiences identify with the unspoken “See? I haven’t changed” comment implicit in Abby’s consistent characterization. For a show whose major lesbian presence before this point consisted of one scene where a lesbian bar owner tells Martinez, “Anything involving a man is rough stuff in my book,” it seems to be a major turning point.

Heterosexual hopes die hard, however, and when Abby invites Greg to have dinner at the apartment she shares with her lover, Kathy (played by Lisa Darr, who went on to star as Ellen Morgan’s girlfriend Laurie Manning in the fourth season of Ellen), Medavoy and Martinez can’t help but speculate about the kind of “special” dinner that Abby wants to have. The narratives that unfold from NYPD Blue are always told consistently from the point of view of the detectives in the squad, so at this point, the audience has no idea what is in the minds of either Abby or the heretofore unseen Kathy.

The scene where Abby confirms their dinner plans unfolds awkwardly, with Abby seeming almost on the verge of excited hysteria. However, when read as an amplification of Greg’s point of view “Greg is reading into her behavior what he wants to see “it makes far more sense, particularly when Greg arrives at the women’s apartment. They are relaxed and comfortable in their own space, while he is as awkward and nervous as ever.

Depictions of domestic spaces on NYPD Blue are fraught with meaning. Most frequently, when the audience (following the detectives) enters a home, they are entering a space that has been violated; its inhabitants have been assaulted or murdered, broken or left for dead. Thus, the detective’s homes become places of sanctuary and solace, infrequently seen and never violated. By bringing Greg, and hence the audience, into Abby and Kathy’s home, the writers open up a window into the character of Abby Sullivan and invite a certain amount of identification with her.

The main point of view, however, remains Greg’s; and the audience takes in the apartment through his eyes, seeing the predominantly white apartment with art scattered around the room and on the walls. Dinner progresses, the women casually bemused by Greg’s continued nervousness, while the audience learns that Kathy is an advertising copy writer with dreams of becoming a novelist and that the two women have been in a long-term committed relationship for some time.

In other words, it is all so very ordinary, and the audience relaxes far more quickly than Greg, who finally bursts out, “Is that a vagina on the wall?” Which in a way, kinda says it all about male heterosexual preoccupation where lesbians are concerned.

The women seem flummoxed for a long moment before Kathy assures him that it’s not and gamely offers to switch chairs with him. Greg realizes what an idiot he’s been (but not before taking Kathy up on her offer) and Kathy reassures him, “You’re a cool guy, Greg.”

Her choice of “cool” as a way to reassure Medavoy is a curious choice of words, for a couple of reasons. “Cool” (at least in the conventional usage) is something Greg has never been or ever will be, and “cool” is a privileged status that in this instance, a marginalized group (the lesbians) is appropriating and bestowing upon a member of the dominant one. The reversal of position begun in “Moby Greg” continues.

Even though the dinner in “A Wrenching Experience” is ultimately a success, the real reason for it remains a mystery. In Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn Heilbrun noted that there are only two narratives for women “marriage and childbirth. When a lesbian character is introduced into a text, the traditional “marriage” narrative is eliminated for obvious reasons. Which seems to leave most on-screen lesbians, even today, with only one narrative.

Childbirth.

In a “Bad Rap,” Abby tells Greg that she and Kathy invited him over for dinner because they are attempting to conceive a child and would like for him to be the donor. This is where the narrative begins to go off the rails. Because of the limitations of NYPD Blue‘s point of view, the audience, while having a sense of Abby and Kathy’s commitment to one another, knows nothing about how or why the two women have come to this decision at this point in their lives. Nor do they know why “given Greg’s slightly erratic behavior, not to mention his male-patterned baldness and less-than stellar physique” the women have decided that Greg would be the perfect father of their child.

Perhaps the answer lies in “You’re a cool guy, Greg,” but the audience has no idea. Instead, the narrative is suddenly reduced in “Emission Impossible” to Greg’s ability to produce a “good amount of semen” upon the demand of Abby’s ovulation cycle.

Forgetting that this isn’t even remotely the way artificial insemination works for lesbian or heterosexual couples, the pairing of Greg’s attempt with the on-going saga of who is stealing quarters from the coffee jar in his locker eliminates any vestiges of the emotional involvement for the audience.

Abby and Kathy are seen for the last time in season four when Greg delivers his “good amount of semen” to the women at their doctor’s office, but the narrative isn’t quite finished with them. In the second episode of season five, “Three Girls and a Baby,” the narrative returns to the lesbians when Kathy is brutally murdered and Abby (now in her third trimester) is shot in the arm. On one level it almost seems like having gotten the lesbian successfully pregnant– thus confirming her womanhood– the text cannot allow her to remain a lesbian “a least an active one with a living, breathing partner.

Revisiting the theme of the sacrosanct nature of the detectives” domestic spaces and the importance of the audience entering one. “Three Girls and a Baby” returns the audience to Abby and Kathy’s apartment, but this time via the more traditional way “looking over the shoulder of the detectives as they survey the carnage. Within the world of NYPD Blue, violence often appearance senseless and it is up to the detectives to render it comprehensible. Yet Abby fails miserably at this, for not only does she fail to protect her partner in her own home, her behavior with Greg following the murder and reports of “ugly” fights with Kathy immediately prior to it cast doubt on her innocence.

Dirty cops and cops who beat their wives and murder their mistresses are familiar territories to NYPD Blue, but fortunately the narrative spares the audience the portrayal of a pregnant, lesbian cop who beats and murders her life partner. Instead, the writers find another lesbian to pin it on “Abby’s jealous, vindictive ex-lover who has never gotten over her and feels betrayed by Abby having a baby with another woman.

Kate Millet has defined patriarchy as a system in which “every avenue of power within society, including the coercive power of the police, is entirely in male hands.” While this might be something of an overstatement, within the text of NYPD Blue, it certainly raises some interesting questions, at least as far as the lesbians are concerned. Heterosexual women, in the forms of Detective Diane Russell (Kim Delaney) and Detective Jill Kirkendall, seem to wield that “coercive” power if not easily, then at least competently.

In the case of Abby Sullivan, the text doesn’t seem content to recoup her to the realm of the heterosexual, via her pregnancy, and the patriarchy, via the murder of her partner. Instead, the narrative is determined to strip her of the very thing that distinguishes her “her autonomy and competence as a cop” by essentially making Kathy’s murder her fault in every sense of the word.

The Abby Sullivan story arc, for better or worse, marks the high water mark for a lesbian presence on NYPD Blue, which makes it a good thing that most lesbians (myself included) didn’t watch the show for its lesbian content. In subsequent seasons, lesbians are once again reduced to one or two episode appearances, usually as the victim of a crime, once as a new squad lieutenant so odious that even gay John Irvin admits that he dislikes her with a fiery burning passion.

Having said all that, do I recommend the fourth season of NYPD Blue? Definitely. Even though your mileage may vary on the lesbian story arc, viewers are treated to the introduction of Jill Kirkendall, a substantial story arc involving Christopher Meloni as shady gun-runner, the snappy writing skills of Meredith Steihm, and the skillful presence of out directors Paris Barclay and Donna Deitch. Do yourself a favor and sit down to watch an episode, and I”ll bet it won’t be your last.

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