When good TV goes bad: why Murder One should have closed its case

Steven Bochco. Even the name somehow evokes a crotchety, bleary-eyed detective slurping bad coffee in a dingy squad room. When the veteran TV writer died earlier this year, the obituaries naturally zeroed in on his greatest hits and misses, from such mighty, monolithic dramas as Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere and NYPD Blue to Bochco’s most notorious botch, the doomed precinct musical Cop Rock. He was a creator and collaborator so prolific that it was perhaps inevitable that some of his projects might get a little lost in the eulogy shuffle.

The gripping, labyrinthine 1990s legal procedural Murder One feels like it should be jockeying for a place in the Bochco pantheon, especially in our longform-worshipping age. In the zig-zagging season one, hellraising Hollywood hunk Neil Avedon – played by Jason Gedrick – is rapidly implicated in the murder of his teen lover, but the show deliberately takes its time. Bochco had already proven himself more than capable of creating a glossy courtroom megahit in the form of LA Law but instead of rattling through a different case each week, Murder One’s gimmick was to follow that single, high-profile murder trial from arrest and arraignment through the whole trundling, stop-start US legal process.

Over the course of 23 gripping episodes, Theodore “Teddy” Hoffman – a stoical, imposing defence attorney in the big, bald, bearish form of Daniel Benzali – marshalled his attractive cadre of associates to try and save their floundering client, even as chaotic moneybags Richard Cross (Stanley Tucci) routinely threatened to jeopardise their case. Shot with often invasive closeups and powered by Benzali’s whispered Brando-level intensity, this was addictively turbulent TV: exhausting, yes, but propulsive and surprising until the very end.

If Murder One had bailed from our screens after the Avedon case was concluded, it would likely be a hallowed regular in those lists of “one-season wonders”. Instead, after it debuted with impressive ratings that began to dwindle, the ever-practical Bochco rolled up his sleeves and attempted to apply a fix. Were casual audiences struggling to follow the twists and switchbacks of a season-long storyline? Season two would follow three high-profile cases over six episodes each. Were ABC execs looking for a more traditional leading man? Benzali got swapped out for Anthony LaPaglia, whose character Jimmy Wyler was a street-smart former assistant district attorney who, unlike Teddy, was single and ready to mingle, not averse to throwing a punch and – perhaps the dealbreaker – had hair.

The result was enjoyable on its own terms, but by removing the overarching pleasures of season one – and also ditching the broiling Benzali and the puckish Tucci – this new Murder One sanded down almost all of the elements that made the original so special. After a rocky start, it eventually evolved into a semi-decent legal potboiler, but let the record show that the launch of season two ultimately torpedoed Murder One.