New York Undercover was one of the first police dramas that captured the sounds, aesthetics and grooves of a changing urban America.
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Set in the 1990s, smack dab in the middle of the golden era of hip-hop, the show featured the goings-on of two male New York City police detectives—an African American and a Puerto Rican—the leads; their Puerto Rican female colleague; and their sharp-tongued Italian female lieutenant. It was a procedural law-and-order show that kept it real regarding the topics it explored—the criminalization of drugs, the complexities of the law-enforcement community, sexual assault, single parenthood—basically, life in any of America's inner cities.
TV One's Unsung is paying homage to the show by taking its fans behind the scenes to detail how the show came to be, what it set out to accomplish and why it ended.
In the trailer below, we see that there was a conscious effort to weave hip-hop and R&B music into the show and that one of the reasons the show ended was that the powers that be wanted to "whiten the show." Sigh.
The Unsung episode airs Wednesday at 8 p.m. EDT.
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Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele is a staff writer at The Root and the founder and executive producer of Lectures to Beats, a Web series that features video interviews with scarily insightful people. Follow Lectures to Beats on Facebook and Twitter.
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