ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, May 14, 1996 TAG: 9605140020
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTY SLEWINSKI NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
So, why do bad things always happen to good characters?
Case in point: ``NYPD Blue's'' Andy Sipowicz, whose agony over the sudden shooting death of his son sends him back to the bottle.
When we first met him, Dennis Franz' character was a wreck - a surly, unhappy, divorced alcoholic who was at odds with his boss.
Then, things started looking up. He became sober, and was happy at work. He mended fences with both his lieutenant and his estranged son. He also got married and, three weeks ago, celebrated the birth of a second son.
Things seemed perfect. Until the start of last week's episode - which turned out to be ``NYPD's'' highest-rated show since January - when Sipowicz reported to the hospital to investigate an assault and robbery in which a good Samaritan had been shot. The Samaritan turned out to be Sipowicz's own son, Andy Jr. The cop-in-training was on his way to pick up his uniform when he spotted trouble and tried to help. He died trying.
``NYPD Blue's'' co-creator and co-executive producer, David Milch, says that while the story line (written by the New York Daily News' Michael Daly) was long-planned, the way it unfolded was sheer serendipity.
Originally, Milch said, he wanted to do this story arc at the end of the first season. But the unavailability of Michael DeLuise, who played Andy Jr. and was concurrently starring in the NBC series ``seaQuest DSV,'' prevented it. DeLuise finally became free to do ``NYPD Blue'' in the middle of this season.
Milch thinks the birth-death coincidence also works to the show's advantage.
``Having Sipowicz be able to say, `I defy the past, I'm a good and healthy soul, and I deserve to be a father,' and then see his older son lost, would test whether Sipowicz really did believe in himself,'' said Milch. ``In my experience, what makes an addict slip is a process of isolation, a failure to participate in the human community.''
And, judging from the show's final scene, in which Sipowicz sits down at a bar and begins downing shots of whisky, he's failing the test.
There is, Milch says, a reason for the slip. ``I think you saw that Sipowicz ... was shutting himself down from the outside world, and, for an addict, once you make yourself inaccessible to the present, once you've isolated yourself, from that point on, you're dry rather than sober. And it's really only a matter of time that you yield to the need to medicate your pain. That's what we're going to see now - a lot of medicating.''
But Sipowicz' backslide, he adds, wasn't the result of too much happiness.
``I don't think Sipowicz was complacent,'' he says. ``I hear all the time that people want to see Sipowicz go back, that people want to see the `bad guy.' But that's not storytelling, it's puppeteering - jerking the character from one mode to another just because the audience wants to see it.
``Believe me,'' he adds, ``They will get their fill, [this] week, of Sipowicz the bad guy.''
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Andy Sipowicz: Medicates the pain.by CNB