17 Years Before 'Bosch,' Titus Welliver Starred in This Forgotten Cop Show With a Controversial TV-MA Rating

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Rarely is there ever a "true" overnight sensation, someone who literally goes from being an unknown to fame almost instantaneously. That fame is earned over years of taking unrecognized small roles in film and television, or being unfortunate enough to land a larger role on a project that falls flat.

Titus Welliver is an actor that serves as an example of such, achieving notable fame with his turn as Detective Harry Bosch in the critically-acclaimed Bosch, which premiered in 2014, despite being in the industry for over 20 years, starting with a role in an episode of Matlock in 1990. Being an "overnight" sensation could've happened a lot sooner, had more eyes tuned in to his turn as Officer Jack Lowery in Brooklyn South, a cop drama cancelled far too soon.

'Brooklyn South' Was Created by 'NYPD Blue's Team

David Caruso and Dennis Franz in 'NYPD Blue.'

Brooklyn South was created by producers Steven Bochco and David Milch, the minds behind NYPD Blue. It was, in fact, created as a counterpart to that lauded series, a gritty police drama centered around beat cops instead of the plainclothes detectives of the former. The series focuses on Brooklyn's 74th Precinct, where Sergeant Frank Donovan (Jon Tenney) hands out assignments to the uniformed officers of the precinct: Officer Ann-Marie Kersey (Yancy Butler); burly Officer Phil Roussakoff (Michael DeLuise); the respected Officer Jimmy Doyle (Patrick McGaw); traffic cop Officer Clement Johnson (Richard T. Jones); sensible Desk Sergeant Richard Santoro (Gary Basaraba); and, of course, Welliver's Officer Lowery, the proverbial tough cop struggling with his own demons. Along for the ride is the (Bochco-created) Hill Street Blues alum James B. Sikking as Lt. Stan Jonas.

The pilot episode promised to match, perhaps even exceed, the notoriety of NYPD Blue with a jarring, graphic opening shootout between a psychotic gunman, who is taking the lives of police officers and innocent bystanders, and police (the series was the first to land a TV-MA rating). A horrifying image of an officer being shot in the head is the moment of infamy. Officer Doyle is the one who finally disarms the killer and takes him in, while preventing the other cops from exacting revenge. But in a scene that would easily be at home in NYPD Blue, Kersey, whose boyfriend was one of the victims, gets the killer alone in an interview room and repeatedly kicks him in the chest, causing a fatal heart attack.

'Brooklyn South' Deserved Better Than an Early Cancellation

The pilot of Brooklyn South set a high precedent and a comparison to Bochco's other fare that it couldn't live up to. As the season went on, the episodes started getting thinner, with too many characters to keep track of, each with their own trials, and Bochco unable to devote the time to the show he normally would due to personal reasons. CBS also made the questionable decision to air Brooklyn South against powerhouse Monday Night Football on ABC and Dateline: Monday on NBC, and while viewership was respectable, it ranked 74th among series airing at the time.

Bochco and Milch took steps to right the ship, adding a new character in the form of an older cop played by John Finn and focusing more on the personal lives of a smaller subset of characters, particularly those played by Butler, DeLuise, Rodriguez, and Welliver. As Milch explains it, the changes were made with an eye on the strengths of certain pairs and partnerships that were standing out from the others (per The Seattle Times). The changes did appear to be working, but the series was still axed after 22 episodes, earning the anger of Bochco, who threatened to pull out of his four-year, three-series deal with CBS, saying, "I have significant issues with CBS" and complaining that the network didn't support the series needed.

It's hard to argue with Bochco on that front, given CBS placed the show in a doomed time slot, and cancelled it before allowing the changes the creative team made to fully take effect. Brooklyn South had all the trademarks indicative of Bochco's work: quick-cut editing, high-quality visuals, emotional swings, characters with depth, and a gray morality. Had things gone differently, Brooklyn South could have been just as revered as Bochco's other works, and Welliver's immense talent would have had the time to be recognized well before Bosch. But Brooklyn South is a prime example of unfulfilled promise, and, as a result, Bosch is a karmic righting of wrongs for Welliver, long overdue, and certainly not overnight.