Can Steven Bochco Top Steven Bochco? : The “NYPD Blue’ Creator Aims to Reinvent the Legal Drama with ABC’s ‘Murder One.’This Isn’t Your Father’s ‘Perry Mason’

The leading man is bald, a bit paunchy, middle-aged and not a household name. He plays a celebrity attorney who defends questionable clients. The format is a risk--23 episodes that follow a single murder case for an entire TV season. And, oh yes, it’s a freshman show going up against the hottest series on the air, “ER.”

So why the buzz about this new, fall ABC drama, “Murder One”? Why did it sell to British TV for a reported $250,000 an episode even though only the pilot has been shot? Who will audiences cheer for in this gray area involving an expensive, high-profile, hired-gun lawyer and a wealthy but sleazy defendant? Is there a hero? Does it matter anymore?

You guessed it. Steven Bochco is at it again.

Just two seasons after breaking TV taboos with rough language and bits of nudity in his hit cop show “NYPD Blue,” the producer is about to take on another new direction. For “Murder One” inevitably will test the impact on TV drama--and the public--of several years of ongoing exposure to such cases as the Menendez brothers and O.J. Simpson murder trials and the introduction of the Court TV channel.

Will viewers bite, as they did for such past breakthrough Bochco shows as “Hill Street Blues” and “L.A. Law”? Or will “Murder One” turn out to be a ratings flop like one of the producer’s other variations on the theme of law enforcement, the short-lived musical police drama “Cop Rock”?

Has Bochco, in short, squeezed just about every drop out of his law-themed series?

“God, I hope not,” he says. “It’s a fair question. Here’s the best answer I can give: When I left ‘Hill Street,’ I said, ‘I’m never going to do another police show ever’ because I couldn’t imagine doing one better. But a dozen years later [in “NYPD Blue”], there’s everything to wring from that old towel because the prevailing attitudes of the society shift.”

Besides the writing and direction, the key to “Murder One” is clearly leading man Daniel Benzali, who commands the screen in rare fashion as the veteran Los Angeles lawyer in the sharply done pilot episode.

“Daniel played an attorney on ‘NYPD Blue,’ and I was utterly taken with him,” Bochco says. “I found him to be riveting on the screen. I thought to myself, ‘Boy, there’s a guy I’d really like to work with.’ I called his agent and I said, ‘Listen, I don’t even know what my next project will be, but please keep me apprised of Daniel’s activities.’

“He’s enormously theatrical. And one of the reasons I thought of him for this role specifically is that I think a courtroom is a theater. And if you’re going to spend a lot of time in a theater, you want people with really big theater chops, and he’s got ‘em.”

Benzali’s credits range from such other TV shows as “L.A. Law,” “The Rockford Files” and “Beauty and the Beast” to London stage productions of “Evita,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Once in a Lifetime” to various plays on and off Broadway.

Madison Avenue seems to like “Murder One,” but is skeptical of its chances head-to-head against NBC’s “ER.”

If “Murder One” gets clobbered by “ER” but shows life-signs, ABC could move it to Mondays after football season, or elsewhere. Meanwhile, ABC Entertainment President Ted Harbert is trying to put a positive spin on the matchup with “ER,” saying:

“We are making one of the most aggressive scheduling decisions in the history of ABC. But we just can’t let ‘ER’ run unopposed. . . . We will get the audience hooked and then give them a very tough choice to make. This matchup may be what finally convinces millions of Americans to learn how to use their VCRs.”

Bochco, 51, admits he was “plagued for a long time” with the question of who the audience will cheer for in “Murder One,” and “we have come to grips with it.” So is his attorney a hero?

“I guess that remains to be seen,” he says. “I don’t know, but I hope there will be a heroic aspect to him in . . . an environment in which it is so easy to lose your moral compass.”

Life and art do overlap a bit in “Murder One.” Attorney Howard Weitzman, who originally represented Simpson and is a friend of Bochco, is a consultant on the series, says the producer.

The case in “Murder One” involves a wealthy businessman implicated in the murder of his mistress’s teen-age sister.

And Bochco, who co-created the series with Charles Eglee and Channing Gibson, says he intends to use his fiction to make points about some of the key elements that have been part of the major criminal cases that have become so compelling on TV.

For example, he says, “The media in cases like this is absolutely ubiquitous. Whether we agree with it or not, these cases now are conducted in a fish bowl. And a lot of what these attorneys on both sides of the line do is try their cases in the press. And the press, of course, is happy to oblige. And given that reality, I think you have to allow it to breathe as a real element in the show.”

Jurors, he says, will also be dealt with.

“Sure. Absolutely. They have to be. I’m not sure this show is going to be as overtly ensemble as ‘L.A. Law,’ but it will have a pretty wide net in terms of characters because you’re talking about witnesses, suspects, prosecution teams, judges, jurors, media. It’s a big, broad canvas.

“All the law dramas we’ve seen, including ‘L.A. Law,’ really showed you everything above the water line, which is a trial essentially. This thing [“Murder One”], by design, is meant to reveal everything below the water line, with the presumption that what’s below the water line is at least as interesting, if not more so, than what’s above it.”

Bochco says that if “Murder One” stays the course, the same format will be applied next year, with a new, single case for the entire season.

However, that single-case format, he admits, “is modified to this extent: I don’t think you can do a pure, pure serial. People don’t watch 23 hours. So we’re going to have a ‘B’ story in every hour that’s completely modular--a legal story that has a beginning, a middle and an end.”

At the same time, the primary story will be reprised with another reflection of contemporary real-life television: “We’re creating a little show inside our show called ‘Law TV,’ which is kind of fashioned after Court TV. And what that’s going to allow us to do near the top of every episode is reprise the salient points of the case in the context of Q&A; with noted defense attorneys and phone-in things.”

Will it be a TV cable show that’s following the case?

“Right.”

Bochco, by the way, is also planning a motion picture about another facet of the law--the Supreme Court--for MGM: “To me, the law really frames in theory what is best about us, and in practice illuminates very often what’s worst about us. I just find the tension of that to be fascinating and the illumination of it very informing.”