Hill Street Blues on Happy Juice

Frustrated at doing police work by the book, detective Wade Preston likes to hark back to the cops he idolizes: "Baretta, Starsky and Hutch, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin -- those guys had fun!" His partner replies impatiently, "Those are TV cops. They're not real." Whines the TV junkie: "Who says everything has to be real?"

Just so. Very little in Bakersfield P.D. qualifies as real, at least by TV's usual standards. In the pixilated police department where this sitcom is set, the captain is a nervous Nellie who can't make a decision without the approval of his protective aide-de-camp. One sentimental cop causes a ruckus when he takes to bestowing kisses on his partner. A crazed gunman barricades himself inside a building and holds off a SWAT team but seems at a loss to explain why. "I want you to send somebody in," he finally calls out, "to help me think of my demands." Even odder, all of this doesn't blast away at viewers with the firepower of a typical sitcom Uzi; devoid of a laugh track, it floats along like an errant Wiffle ball.

Bakersfield P.D. is the best-kept secret of the new season. To find the show on the weekly Nielsen chart, one practically has to turn the newspaper upside down: for the season to date, the Fox show ranks 99th out of a possible 101. Despite the bleak numbers, Fox programmers have renewed the show for the entire season -- evidence of either a sorry lack of replacements on the bench or a heartening faith in what is easily the best new comedy of the season.

Executive producer Larry Levin, a former writer for It's Garry Shandling's Show and creator of last season's cop spoof Arresting Behavior, concedes that even in the best circumstances, Bakersfield P.D. is unlikely to become a Top 10 hit. "I'm asking viewers to look sideways at stuff instead of dead-on, and it throws most people," he says. "My feet are firmly planted in sand. Nothing is black and white to me."