Has any other TV show dipped in quality and fandom as much as New York Undercover?

Submitted by stevenw84 t3_11cw54e in television

I'm a fan of what Dick Wolf does, unapologetically so. I was only 10 when this show aired (1994), but I watched it with my parents and it was my introduction to police shows.

That said, I recently rewatched the series on Peacock, for the first time since airing. I remember some of the key plot lines, but for the life of me I cannot understand some of the decisions.

Seasons 1 and most of 2 were very stylized and unique, with some decent story taking place outsode of the 1 4 precinct. Then, for whatever reason, the tone changed and the show became stale.

The inclusion McNamara helped bring in a wider audience, but the conclusion of season 3 just baffled me to no end. Behind the scenes politics aside, the killing of two main characters in the same episode never sat right with me. On top of that, the 4th season completely changed the show to the point it may have well been called something else.

Excuse my griping, but I've never talked with anyone who was a fan of this show.

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acosmichippo t1_ja5fkhh wrote

Heroes

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stevenw84 OP t1_ja5fmgp wrote

Never seen it, but I've heard negative things.

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acosmichippo t1_ja5k86e wrote

first season was amazing and incredibly popular. then the writers strike hit.

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Maninhartsford t1_ja6gyrd wrote

Don't let the writers off that easy. The strike is why the season was only 11 episodes long, not why those 11 episodes were bad. Scripted TV shut down for a few months, they didn't replace their writers.

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idontlikeflamingos t1_ja773lh wrote

And it continued to be crap in the following seasons.

The writers strike maybe made the downfall quicker but it was inevitable. It's clear that season 1 was the only one they really had figured out a story to tell. After that it was just milking it and making shit up as it went along.

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reeeallycoolusername t1_ja6x2g4 wrote

This is a great answer, I remember watching week to week every season and asking myself "Why".

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And then the reboot happened...

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KingEuronIIIGreyjoy t1_ja5ip0i wrote

House of Cards. At its height (around season 2 to 3, I'd say), it was one of the best shows on TV, and r/television was all over it. Then real life became more interesting and outpaced what the show could keep up with, Spacey was outed as a predator, and the writing fell off a cliff. Now nobody ever talks about it.

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IndyRevolution t1_ja6k2pr wrote

It's less about the "real life" thing and more because they had no idea how to write an interesting show about Frank as President and Season 3 became bloated and boring. There were a lot of comments on this very sub about how people had trouble paying attention to Season 3.

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berlinbaer t1_ja6iol9 wrote

show was trash even before all the spacey stuff happened. season 3 was already dumb as fuck

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bluebirdgm t1_ja69mn7 wrote

Haven’t seen it, but I gather that this happened with Netflix’s “Altered Carbon.”

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FerreiraMatheus t1_jaa1nys wrote

First season was so fucking good, I REALLY like it. Now let's make a second season that it not cyber OR punk, just a boring loving story. I was so pissed, and still am.

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xopranaut t1_ja5f5y9 wrote

Did you miss the news about Game of Thrones?

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stevenw84 OP t1_ja5fksc wrote

Oh I've seen it, multiple times. While I agree with what you're saying, that debate has had its day in the sun.

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xopranaut t1_ja5fydj wrote

Absolutely. It does make you wonder how much bigger a deal stories like yours would have been if social media had been a thing much earlier.

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jblanch3 t1_ja5hvwb wrote

It's already looking like this thread is going to have the same discussion it seems to have every other day about which shows declined in quality and stuff like that. It's nice that you brought up New York Undercover, I didn't know it was streaming. I know BET was airing reruns recently and I watched a few episodes. I used to watch it back in the day, I think I stopped around Season 3 or around there. It was a really long time ago, so I can't really elaborate on what exactly changed, but I know I wasn't enjoying it as much as I used to so I stopped watching. It was a very unique show for its time, in that the two main characters, detectives were minorities and their captain was a woman. And it felt natural, it didn't feel like they were pandering. It had that Dick Wolf feel like Law and Order, but it had a more gritty, on the ground quality since it was just about the cops. I'm just giving my really basic assessment; again, I hadn't watched it in a very long time until recently, and only a couple of episodes at that. Malik Yoba and Lauren Velez seem to have had pretty decent careers, I still see them in stuff to this day. I don't know what happened with Michael DeLorenzo, I don't recall seeing him in anything after this.

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stevenw84 OP t1_ja5izcl wrote

Two non white cops with a female boss. Characters using racial slurs to help drive the point of the episode home (for example white kid accused of bombing black churches). Pretty edgy for the time but it was Fox, after all.

One thing the show portrayed was a strong, black man that was an attentive father. It often bucked stereotypes but sometimes would fall victim to some obvious preaching.

Then maybe halfway into season 3, the show became more generic, and lost some of the "urban" feel. I'm as white as they come, but grew up in an area where I was the minority.

Another thing that stuck with me was the subject matter. Lots of kids being killed on camera, and other brutal crimes relating to children either as victims or perpetrators.

Lastly, it made NYC look just as dirty as it really was at the time.

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jblanch3 t1_ja5joke wrote

Yes, I believe New York Undercover was part of Fox's Thursday night bloc, which were all shows with a (mostly) minority cast. I believe it was Martin, then Living Single, then New York Undercover (since Fox's prime time slot was just two hours, and still is today).

Your view on what changed about the show sounds about right. I can't point to anything specific (that time/memory thing yet again), but it started feeling "samey". A part of television since its inception has been shows about cops and the law, and so many of them seemed to hit the same exact note. New York Undercover appealed to me because it felt so fresh and raw compared to the other cop shows airing at that time. My theory is that the ratings were flat and the consultants at the network wanted to boost them up, so they "retooled" it and took away what made it fresh and raw and different. Again, something you see to this day.

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stevenw84 OP t1_ja5gh7h wrote

You know what, Sliders did this as well.

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VikAzeem23 t1_ja6hfcq wrote

The first 3 seasons are fantastic, but as you said, season 4 is unwatchable and a whole different tone/show.

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stevenw84 OP t1_ja6i6ri wrote

I was about to tap out during mid season 3, but I wanted to see how it wrapped up as I didn't remember details.

But yes, jarring to say the least.

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VikAzeem23 t1_ja6iz7n wrote

There is a a behind the scenes documentary on YouTube about it. There was an edict tfrom the network during season 3 to tone down the urban feel of the show. At the same time, the two leads basically demanded more money before the start of the season. Cooler heads prevailed but everyone on the show was shocked when they got that final script and seeing that Eddie was being killed off. Keep in mind, the ratings for the show were still strong.

The killing of Eddie Torrez essentially killed the audience. Eddie/JC were the show. And it is especially frustrating when you realize how unneeded it was. In the storyline they had already written his character off by having him have to move to a different precinct. And, he didn't die in a multi-episode arc or from a meaningful villain like Ice-T. It was a random villain of the week that blows him up.

Audiences were pissed, and within a few episodes of season 4 it was clear they weren't coming back. The show was canceled pretty quickly into season 4.

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stevenw84 OP t1_ja6lzcq wrote

Yup. I remember how he died but was surprised at the fact he'd have to leave the precinct due the marriage. Ok fine, so leave, don't show him on screen. Made no since. Something similar happened on SVU where Rollins quit the force to become a professor. In reality she didn't get the money she wanted, so they wrote her off.

People underestimate Latin/Hispanic support. This was a prime example of that.

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reeeallycoolusername t1_ja6xjcg wrote

I think Dexter killed it for the first 4 seasons and then dipped at a rapid pace after that.

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reddig33 t1_ja5g17r wrote

Helix.

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chairmanpao10 t1_ja67sv2 wrote

Fell off a cliff mid season 1

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Maninhartsford t1_ja6guow wrote

Yeah, there was a point where everyone literally stopped caring about the infectious plague currently in their research station cause the writers were already on the next idea lol

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AnotherDecentBloke t1_ja6cyvq wrote

Might be easier to list series that didn't dip in quality. The better the series, the more they try and get blood out of the stone as it runs out of material.

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OdoWanKenobi t1_ja82qpz wrote

Arrow ran so far off a cliff at one point that the show's own subreddit gave up on it and became a Daredevil sub instead.

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freedraw t1_ja9z1ie wrote

Let me tell you about a show we used to call “Sliders”…

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stevenw84 OP t1_jaa1tk5 wrote

Ugh. That one really annoyed me. It was my introduction to sci-fi and I immediately loved it. Recently watched the series again as well.

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klimtl t1_ja6bm22 wrote

NYPD Blue(s)

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Korrocks t1_ja7pgeg wrote

“Unreal”. Season 1 was great but season 2 was garbage. Iirc the main show runner left the series at the end of season 1 and took all of the writing talent with her.

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Atlas756 t1_ja8hk6g wrote

Did you hear about the last season of Game of Thrones?

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im_a_dick_head t1_ja8zvvc wrote

Designated Survivor very good for around 2 seasons, then it fell off...

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stannenb t1_ja9qcmb wrote

Yellowstone, where Taylor Sheridan's inability to work with a collaborative writing staff combined with his ever growing list of spinoffs/projects/ranches has taxed his ability to maintain a consistent plot that makes some sort of rational sense.

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Loud_Debate_3177 t1_jabns6p wrote

Ive never seen a show drop as hard as game of thrones

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res30stupid t1_ja7q5cl wrote

Exclusive for a dub of a show, but the original DiC production of Sailor Moon ended up suffering a loss of quality rather rapidly with even the original English dub's voice actors outright stating that they agreed with fans that the dub was completely rubbish. In fact, the show's second voice actress for Setsuna/Trisha/Sailor Pluto, Susan Aceron, even said that it was a mistake that she was cast to be in that series at all.

There's actually a known and stated reason for this, however, as given by Roland Parliament who was the voice of Umino/Melvin and the show's second ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) director in his autobiography Sailor Moon Reflections.

In short, the first voice of Sailor Moon, Tracey Moore, was also the show's first ADR director but was so heavily overworked that she suffered from burnout and quit thirteen episodes into the show's production (episodes 1-11, 15 and 21), so when she quit she was replaced with Roland.

They tried to keep her in the role by replacing her as ADR director with castmates who had smaller roles in the show. But because of clashes with a producer at Optimum Productions, Nicole Thuault who also heavily clashed with Moore while she was the ADR director, Parliament was fired from the role as ADR director as well as his replacement John Stocker, who played Rei's grandfather in the dub.

When Optimum completed their original recording sessions for the show, DiC decided to stop licensing the show and left them stranded. But Cartoon Network and YTV wanted more episodes dubbed so they paid for it themselves and ordered the adaptations directly. All 77 remaining episodes... in four months. Optimum couldn't get most of the original cast for a number of reasons - some of the voice actors hated the conditions and refused to come back while at least one of them outright couldn't due to being on maternity leave.

After this, Thuault decided that she might as well take on the role as the show's ADR director instead. This was despite the fact that despite being a producer on the show's English dub, she didn't fucking speak English and in fact needed a translator on-site to help her communicate with the cast and crew. By the way, did I mention that Optimum was based out of Ontario?

So, the ADR director wasn't able to properly quality control the recording, they had to adapt 77 episodes of the show in four months and most of the original cast was gone. They only had four hours to record each episode and took were only allowed to do two takes for each scene/episode and decided to use the one that wasn't shit. Quality dropped immensely, the seasons adapted were widely hated until the entire series was re-dubbed by Viz and it proved to be such an old shame that the DiC dub will never be rereleased again.

And for added hilarity, when they were doing the translation of the scripts into English, because of a stupid term of the contract that they were using, they weren't adapting the original Japanese scripts of the show but the earlier French dub produced in Paris.

Oh, and here's something funny I wanted to bring up as well. They had to make some changes to the show to appease US censors, mainly because the show could actually get somewhat violent for US audiences. One pair of junior high school students were expressly a pair of lesbians in the original Japanese version which was turned into them being cousins in the English dub... but they didn't fully remove all of the pretext, so it made them look like teenage incestuous lesbians instead.

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bangharder t1_ja8cv3m wrote

Ny undercover wasn’t good ever tho

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stevenw84 OP t1_ja8drx3 wrote

Hot take.

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bangharder t1_ja8i7a3 wrote

It’s true, it was just different the cops weren’t white, that was all it had going for it, and I watched it every week

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stevenw84 OP t1_ja8j6lr wrote

Well, name another cop drama that showed 90s NYC for what it actually was? Nothing about this show was pretty.

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bangharder t1_ja9etlu wrote

That doesn’t make it good tho, accuracy doesn’t equal quality

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RelationRealistic t1_ja5ptb4 wrote

SNL. They had the hottest actor currently in the world, Pedro Pascal, and bombed in all live skits with him.

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RealJohnGillman t1_ja5tgpg wrote

opens mouth to bring up Mario Kart

> “live skits”

closes mouth

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RelationRealistic t1_ja61fv1 wrote

There's nothing wrong with Saturday Night Taped but Saturday Night Live is broke.

I love Update, but even it's writing is getting worse.

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