NYPD Blue.

Steven Bochco's new series, "NYPD Blue," is by now running on ABC--or at least all but fifty-seven or so ABC affiliates who've caved in to the protests of the Religious Right (a term to which we shall return). It is--let's get this out front from the beginning--brilliant. The camera work is cutting-edge sophisticated and hip; the big-city ambiance perfectly captures the massive, sudden loneliness, and metaphysical finality of Urbs Americana; the plotting is intricate and, for all its intricacy, convincing and rich with promise for future development; and the dialogue--here I speak with professional envy--is to kill to be able to write. In an early scene in the first episode, Detective John Kelly (David Caruso) confronts his older, alcoholic, and slipping partner, Andy Sefowitz (Dennis Franz) in a bar. "When's the last time you tried to go on the wagon?" asks Kelly. And Sefowitz (Franz, than whom perhaps no actor working is better at miming existential self-loathing) rounds on his partner and--it's the only word--spits, "When's the last time you tried to grow tits?" Nine words, folks: the right nine words and, as delivered by the extraordinary Franz, much better than a truckload of books on the desperation--and desperate wisdom--of a drowning drunk who sees with terrible clarity the whirlpool he's caught in. I'm not kidding here: it's an instant of heart-stopping, great acting. And that, in its bitter charity, is just how good "NYPD Blue" was throughout its first episode.

So what's the problem?

The problem is the Reverend Donald Wildmort.

Donald Wildmon lives in Tupelo, Mississippi--where Elvis was born. Wildmon is the founder of the American Family Association, which claims, as of 1991,400,000 members nationwide, and whose burning mission is to monitor and then protest excessive violence, profanity, and nudity--I hope I've got the hierarchy right--on TV.

Wildmon's thought police have protested "Soap," "Maude," "Hill Street Blues," "Married--With Children," "L.A. Law," and God knows what else. An AFA protest takes this form: if you run this show, we, all 400,000 of us, will stop watching your station and buying products from your advertisers. And, of course, they've been doing the same thing, with hypus maximus, over "NYPD Blue."

Now since Newsweek. Time, and all those other secular, glossy weeklies have also blazoned the AFA/"NYPD" brouhaha-- there' ve been petitions against its "pornography" in local drugstores to be signed by people who haven't even seen the thing--let's get a few things very straight.

First: Is "NYPD Blue" Important? Answer: Yes, not just because it is a great show, but because a number of areas in the country are not even going to get the option of disagreeing with me about that, just because Wildmort & Co. have already made the choice and found station managers weak-livered enough in those venues to go along.

Second: Is The Show That Great? Answer: No. But it's really, really good. Caruso and Franz are a perfectly matched pair, the first young and on his way up but already separated from his wife because of the job, the second burned-out and in daily, howling despair but still preserving a core of wistfully-remembered dignity. Unlike "Hill Street Blues" and "L.A. Law," this Bochco vehicle promises to be an exploration of the psychic struggles of two guys trying to make sense of their lives in the urban tangle where we all, after all, live. With luck and talent (and God knoweth the show has alotta that) it may be that great.

Third: Is It Pornographic and Hyperviolent? Answer: Here as so often the Religious Right is actually the Religious Wrong. In the first episode, one guy--Franz--gets shot, and much of the show is scarily about what it really means to take some bullets, in a way that should trouble, more than anybody else, the NRA. And there' s, okay, some nudity and some language, as Aunt Hester used to say: nothing that your average six-year-old from Chicago or, for that matter, Mayberry R.F.D. doesn't know about. And the thing airs, nationwide, at 10 P.M. Ten. Don't the AFA soldiers know how to tell their kids to go to bed? Haven't they discovered the great, radiant secret of the TV set--that it has an OFF button?

And Fourth: Don't We All Have Better Things To Do? Answer: Oh, Yeah. "NYPD Blue" is wonderful, moving, human stuff. I hope it runs forever. But, like every work of art from Hamlet to "Garfield," it's just a work of art. As Auden wrote, "poetry causes nothing," and that's its glory as well as its limitation. Ever since Plato, in The Republic, banished poets because they were immoral liars, the smug, maddeningly normal self-righteous have been trying to insist that this sort of thing is bad, perverting, soul-destructive for you. And we read those two--literally--appalling books, the Iliad and the Bible. and we still come away from their gore and chaos the better for having been there. Maybe--I'm not kidding here--there's some kind of recessive gene that inhibits the ability to use storytelling as a tool for living, that blocks the sense of metaphor.

Wer weisst? The show itself is about as good as TV can get. As a second-rank detective writer, I'm covered with envy at the thing: it's the way a big city feels, and it's the way it feels to try to live in, and make a human life in, that surprisingly alien environment. At its center, it's a story about how terribly hard we try to love one another, and how terribly hard that is: which is, of course, what the big city is all about.

And it will, I hope, survive the initial flak generated by Wildmon and his brethren of the AFA. Or maybe it will thrive because of that. Surely, no TV premiere in recent years has gotten this much media attention: Wildmon's wildmen have made sure that everybody who could watch the first episode would watch the first episode.

Steven Bochco must be, at this moment, one of the happiest guys in the world: not only because he's brought forth yet one more splendid demonstration of how good TV can be, but because he's summoned forth the ideal, thin-lipped and school-marish adversary to make his grand show look even better than it really is.