NYPD Blue Season 2

DVD Wholesale Quick Overview:

Now that we’ve seen The Wire, it’s worth revisiting NYPD Blue to see if it has stood the test of time. It has. The show stands with Homicide, The Wire, and the original first several seasons of Law & Order as one of the best American cop shows of all time.

The less good:
While NYPDB does get a bit too soapy for my taste sometimes with the personal drama outside the precinct building and crime scenes, that is indeed a taste thing. Along these lines, I grow weary of the sex scenes, which at the time were quite something for network television, but which only very rarely add anything substantive. That said, this content does not subsume the rest of the show, and some of the personal drama does in any case flesh out the characters in some interesting ways.

The great (which far outweighs the above foibles):
The show’s strengths rest in the dialogue, fantastic acting, pathos (especially with Dennis Franz, both the actor and his character as written), and, for the most part, really excellent casting of tertiary characters (Paul Ben-Victor in the Season 2 episode, You Bet Your Life, is just the best of the best – really wonderful). We have grown accustomed to gritty realism in cop dramas, but NYPDB (along with Homicide: Life On the Streets, which was developed around the same time) was a real path forger in this respect.

-E. Beckstrom

DVD Wholesale Main Features:

Actors: David Caruso, Jimmy Smits, Dennis Franz, James McDaniel, Nicholas Turturro
Directors: Mark Tinker, Michael M. Robin, Robert J. Doherty, Steven DePaul, Donna Deitch
Writers: Steven Bochco, David Milch, Bill Clark, Matt Olmstead, Nicholas Wootton
Format: NTSC
Language: English (Dolby Surround), French (Mono), Spanish (Dolby Surround)
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only.)
Number of discs: 6
Rated: NR-Not Rated
Studio: FOX
DVD Release Date: May 20, 2008
ASIN: B00189PSLS