‘Detroit 1-8-7’ traverses a city’s tricky self-image topography

Inside a Detroit police precinct, an African American lieutenant wearily addresses an off-screen documentary crew. She stands beside an enormous dry-erase board full of tiny red and black names representing murder victims. “They don’t make felt markers that write any smaller so we’ve sort of hit capacity,” she says of the cluttered board. “Get ‘em solved, make room for the next one.” She tilts her head in a half-hearted shrug, then adds, “We might be the last assembly line in Detroit.”

Thus began the original pilot for ABC’s new police procedural “ Detroit 1-8-7,” starring Michael Imperioli and James McDaniel, the first prime-time network drama set, shot and produced in the Motor City (though the pilot itself was primarily filmed in Atlanta).

Michigan has looked to boost its flat-lining economy by attracting film and television production, and “Detroit 1-8-7” is Motown’s biggest score to date: Its 12 initial episodes have already invested around $25 million locally. The show joins HBO’s “Hung” and truTV’s “Hardcore Pawn” (a reality show about “the baddest pawnshop in the United States,” whose premiere last month drew 2 million viewers) as current series filmed in or near the city.

Not everyone is excited for Detroit’s small-screen big break, though. Detroit has a complicated relationship with its own representation, one that’s almost as fraught with conflict as the city’s tortuous racial and class history. After decades of dubious depictions, from ‘70s blaxploitation movies like “Detroit 9000” to ultraviolent ‘80s sci-fi like “RoboCop,” the tension between fictional renderings and Detroit’s own image of itself remains as unresolved as a cold case.

Almost as soon as the ABC show’s trailer surfaced, some Detroit politicians objected to the series’ title — “187,” after all, is cop code (and hip-hop slang) for homicide, evoking the “Murder Capital” tag that has haunted the city since the early 1970s. Series executive producers David Zabel and Jason Richman met with the mayor’s office and other city officials, but in late July the Detroit City Council passed a resolution opposing the series’ name and urging ABC to be sensitive in its portrayal.

“We’re not trying to push Hollywood out of the city,” said Detroit City Councilman Kwame Kenyatta. “If they’re here, it’s good for jobs, but not at the expense of negative and untrue imagery of a city that is trying to pull itself back together.”

Zabel and Richman left the title intact, but they didn’t completely resist the pressure for change. In fact, that opening scene won’t even appear when the series premieres on Sept. 21. The producers say they reshot approximately 15% of the pilot to eliminate the faux-documentary plot angle entirely.

Their decision followed a tragic incident in May in which Detroit police accidentally shot and killed a 7-year-old girl during a botched raid. The officers had been accompanied by a crew from the A&E reality show “The First 48,” which triggered a department-wide ban on camera crews tagging along with police.

Dropping the documentary framing device forced a radical reworking of the show’s original concept, but the producers felt they had no choice. “It was a very, very big deal,” said Richman of the Detroit reaction to the girl’s death. “It was ultimately more important to us that we set the show in Detroit than to try and change the location somehow and maintain the conceit.” At that point, said Richman, they had “already fallen in love character-wise and story-wise with the way our characters would interact with the city.”

Detroit has been linked to crime in pop culture ever since “T-Men,” Anthony Mann’s gritty 1947 noir about Treasury agents on the trail of counterfeiters, and in real life a new PR indignity seems to lie around every corner. In the last few years, former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s downfall played out in national headlines, Forbes named it America’s most dangerous city, Time ran a cover story on Detroit’s “death,” and CNN included it on its list of the 10 most dangerous cities in the world, alongside Juarez, Mexico, and Baghdad.

Zabel, who spent the last five years as show runner for “ER,” insists he’s sympathetic to the city’s concerns and promises “1-8-7” will offer a truer version of Detroit. “The irony at the end of the day is,” said Zabel, “I think our fictional representation, even though it’s against the backdrop of a crime series, is going to be more balanced and have more levels and complexity than what people get from the news.”

Not that all the headlines are wrong: Detroit has been hit especially hard by the recession, making the area synonymous with the downwardly mobile (see the city’s cameo in 2009’s “Up in the Air”). HBO’s dark comedy “Hung,” now concluding its second season, places Detroit at the epicenter of the current economic earthquake.

“Everything’s falling apart, and it all starts here in Detroit, the headwaters of a river of failure,” narrates high-school-coach-turned-neophyte-gigolo Ray Drecker ( Thomas Jane) over images of Tiger Stadium being demolished and automobiles — the region’s lifeblood — being crushed. Despite its title sequence highlighting various downtown landmarks, however, most of “Hung’s” action takes place in its sprawling suburbs, indicated not just by the leafy locations but also by a conspicuous scarcity of African Americans.

Such casting is anomalous, because setting a narrative in Detroit — the largest U.S. city with a majority black population and one of the nation’s most segregated metro areas — is usually a way to comment about race. The Detroit area has often been used in movies as the geographic equivalent of a stock character — an otherwise blank tableau for racial confrontation (“Zebrahead,” “Gran Torino”) or dystopian visions of future anarchy (“RoboCop,” “The Crow”). On television, the city has often served as shorthand for “African American striver” (“Martin,” “Sister, Sister”) or “white working stiff” (“Home Improvement” and “Hung”). Which is a shame, because the city offers much in the way of cinematic vistas.

The city’s backdrop of burnt-out buildings and abandoned skyscrapers has, however, provided a fertile breeding ground for reality shows. A scan of the basic cable listings on a given evening might turn up repeats of NatGeo’s “Detroit Gang Squad,” A&E’s “Detroit SWAT” or even Animal Planet’s “Animal Cops: Detroit.”

Former Detroit Police Chief Warren Evans further muddied the thin blue line between keeping it real and voyeuristic exploitation when he was forced to resign in July after a proposed pitch tape surfaced for his own reality show, “The Chief,” showing him marching past the ghostly ruins of the Michigan Central Depot train station with a semiautomatic rifle like a post-”Rambo” Wild West sheriff.

It’s not merely reality shows that are proliferating. Detroit is in the midst of an unprecedented production boom: According to the Michigan Film Production office, there are 47 projects shooting in the area in 2010, compared with just two in 2008.

This flurry of activity offers not only a potential economic path forward but also a creative opportunity for new voices to be heard, whether they be network shows such as “Detroit 1-8-7” or independent projects like “BURN: One Year on the Frontlines of the Battle to Save Detroit,” a documentary about the Detroit Fire Department that’s trying to raise completion funds via a moving 10-minute trailer posted online at https://www.detroitfire.org.

The “BURN” clip offers the tantalizing prospect of a well-made film unflinchingly examining Detroit and the considerable hurdles in front of it without ignoring some of the city’s most impressive qualities: perseverance, resilience and survival.

A city whose history was central to the American experiment, Detroit needs someone who can conjure its urban poetry the way that David Simon did for Baltimore and New Orleans (in “The Wire” and “Treme”). Whether “Detroit 1-8-7” will be that vehicle remains to be seen. Despite the bumpy reception they’ve initially received from city leaders, the show’s producers insist they’re up to the task.

“You really feel like you’re in a city that cares about itself,” said Richman. “They recognize the challenges they’re facing, and it makes you feel like you kind of have an obligation to honor that.”

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