Cops

Cops is a rare American Century Theater offering, a play that never made it to Broadway. Nonetheless it is an important play and a trail-blazing one, as it bridged the gap between Sidney Kingsley’s 1949 police station drama Detective Story and the conventional television police dramas of the 50s and 60s. What resulted was Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue and Homicide, the often violent and intense police shows that gave a jolt of new energy to TV in the 70s and defined the genre to this day.