Brooklyn South

Brooklyn South is an American ensemble police drama television series that aired on CBS for one season from September 22, 1997, to April 27, 1998. It was aired during the 1997–98 television season. The series was co-created by Steven Bochco, Bill Clark, David Milch, and William M. Finkelstein. The series attempted to create a setting of a gritty, realistic police station similar to NYPD Blue, but focusing on the uniformed police officers rather than the detectives. The pilot was rated TV-MA for violence, and received attention and controversy as the first broadcast television episode to receive the classification, airing the same year the rating system was introduced. Synopsis The focus for Brooklyn South was the 74th Precinct in Brooklyn. Francis "Frank" Donovan (Jon Tenney) was the patrol sergeant who presided every day over the morning shift assignments he gave to the uniformed officers. Donovan was an informant for the hated Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB), and secretly reported to Lt. Stan Jonas (James B. Sikking), who, early in the series, transferred from being an IAB officer to the precinct captain after the officious Captain Lou Zerola (Bradford English) transferred to precinct maintenance. It was later revealed in the season that Donovan became an undercover informant 15 years earlier for IAB to protect his father, a retired cop living in Florida, from indictment for corruption. In the pilot episode, a psychotic gunman named Hopkins went on a shooting rampage outside the police station, killing a number of policemen and innocent bystanders. He was wounded in the shootout and disarmed and handcuffed by Officer Doyle, who later stopped the other cops from beating Hopkins to death and left his barely breathing self in the interview room alone. It was later revealed that Ann-Marie Kersey (Yancy Butler), a policewoman whose boyfriend was one of the victims of the shooting spree, slipped into the room where Hopkins was and kicked him several times in the chest, leading to Hopkins suffering a fatal heart attack. The killer's family pressured the city to launch an Internal Affairs investigation as they were convinced that he was murdered by cops in retaliation for his killing rampage. Eventually, everyone was exonerated for the suspect's death and Kersey completely got away with it, though her guilt over murdering a critically wounded criminal would haunt her off-and-on for the duration of the series.