Brooklyn South.

It is Monday night, 10:00, and there you sit, exhausted, and turn on the TV to see the much-hyped latest offering from Steven Bochco, Brooklyn South. This was supposed to be "the one to watch" this fall--more "gritty," more "authentic," more "real" (I always love it when TV promises to be more real) than anything else on the tube. The "first nine minutes," advertised CBS, "will leave you breathless." This lack of oxygen seems to have affected the reviewers, who raved about this "high-quality" drama.

The opening sequence shows a stiff phalanx of cops adoringly filmed from a low angle while Mike Post's music--a cross between his old theme for Hill Street Blues and the anthem of The Lion King--announces that we are bearing witness to nobility, courage, altruism. Now that you know how you're supposed to be positioned--upward-gazing, even awestruck--the show can proceed.

Cut to a street scene where a man--and yes, he is African American--breaks into a car. He finds a gun in the glove compartment and, jubilant, starts running down the street. An off-duty cop sees this and, flashing his own gun, tells the guy to stop. The thief shoots the cop instead. Now he has two guns. In a scene that makes most spaghetti westerns look restrained by comparison, he runs down the street brandishing both guns, and by the time the dust settles, he's shot four cops and taken a white woman hostage. Finally he gets shot. The police take him down to the station, with paramedics close behind.

But not close enough. Before they can get to the station, the cops of Brooklyn South have thrown the guy on the floor, where they are hurling epithets at him, and they give him a few kicks for good measure.

The show wants you, the hapless viewer, to be understanding of--even sympathetic to--police brutality. After all, this dark-skinned superpredator just shot four cops--if you were a cop, and just lost four of your colleagues, wouldn't you want to kick him, too? Don't be so quick to condemn police brutality, the show suggests, until you've stood in their shoes. You're not going to identify with that scum bag on the floor, are you? As co-creator David Milch put it, the purpose of the show was to have the audience "get the visceral understanding of how the cops felt."

It is simply stupefying that CBS would actually air this premiere so hard on the heels of the Abner Louima incident, where actual cops--in Brooklyn, no less--sodomized the Haitian suspect and sent him into the hospital.

In the premiere of Brooklyn South, the suspect actually dies while in custody, and in short order, his heartbroken but obedient mother comes in, begging to see her son one last time and agreeing to help the cops however she can.

Not so fast. Hard on her heels is the suspect's sister, a combative, multi-braided militant who immediately accuses the cops of police brutality. She's with a black minister-cum-community activist eager to exploit the situation. Now, because of her, the battle lines are drawn. Because of her, there's absolutely no possibility for dialogue across the races.

The women in the show, regardless of color, are bitches, sluts, or wimps. The wife of one of the cops, angry that he doesn't make enough money and won't borrow more so she can buy stuff, seduces other men and deliberately gets caught nearly bursting out of her push-up bra so he'll see the light of day. This nightmare of a wife gets killed off in a subsequent episode, liberating her long-suffering husband. Cheers all around.

In another episode, one of our men in blue persuades a boy who is about ten years old and involved in drug running (yes, he, too, is African American) to rat on the dealers and help the cop arrest them. There you are, on your couch at home, yelling to the kid not to do it because he'll get killed--which, of course, he does. The cop is remorseful, but a quick trip to confession fixes that.

This is nothing new for Bochco. In NYPD Blue, he repeatedly asks us to see urban life through the eyes of the cops. I watch NYPD Blue as much as the next guy, but I can't stand the mystification of police work through specialized lingo only club members understand ("drop a dime," "the DOA"). I resent being manipulated by the insistent claim that no guilty party will ever confess without a few slaps from Detective Sipowicz. And I do not appreciate the message that the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are dispensable.

In real life, police brutality is a national epidemic routinely excused by the courts. The Stolen Lives Project (www.unstoppable.com/22) has so far documented the deaths of more than 300 people at the hands of our nation's police since 1989, and they re still collecting statistics.

How about a gritty, authentic show about a group like this, whose weekly mission is to expose and triumph over police brutality? I can see the sponsors lining up already.

The good news is that, according to a Brooklyn South web site, the show went from nineteenth in the Nielsens on its premiere to fifty-second just three weeks later. It's rare that a TV drama can make its competition--Monday Night Football--seem positively enlightened.

Susan Douglas teaches Communications Studies at the University of Michigan.