The Five Points neighborhood was a notorious slum in lower Manhattan. (
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Call it the anti-“CSI.”
Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, executive producers of “Homicide: Life on the Street,” are going back in time with “Copper,” a new police drama set in 1864 in New York. The post-Civil War saga, BBC America’s first scripted show, is an intriguing hybrid of period drama and crime procedural. “The networks would never do something like this,” says Levinson. “Their approach is much more simplistic, and follows a formula.”
With vividly detailed sets that make each episode look and feel like a one-hour film, “Copper” tells the tale of detective Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones), a brooding Irish immigrant who takes the law into his own brass-knuckled hands to solve murders in the notorious slums of Five Points. In the pilot, Corcoran searches for the killer of a young girl. The case takes him from Five Points, to the elite world of Fifth Avenue. where he is aided by his friend, fellow Civil War soldier Robert Morehouse (Kyle Schmid), a wayward aristocrat. African-American doctor Matthew Freeman (Ato Essandoh), who served as Morehouse’s valet in the war, secretly helps Corcoran with his forensic investigations, allowing him to take credit for his new modern methods.
Levinson and Fontana, who wrote the pilot with Academy Award nominee Will Rokos (“Monster’s Ball”), re-create the teeming Five Points (today’s Chinatown and Little Italy), the African-American community Carmansville (now Harlem) and the city’s genteel uptown neighborhoods (the area between 14th and 23rd streets) on a Toronto soundstage.
“I always try to create a sense of place,” says Levinson, who, because of Canadian tax laws, couldn’t direct any episodes himself, but instead oversaw the work of a roster of Canadian directors. “With ‘Copper’ it was very important to convey the claustrophobia of Five Points, where the poor lived, and contrast that with the more open, genteel sense of uptown, where the wealthy lived.”
Levinson says the period was rife with interesting historical detail that made for compelling storytelling. “One of the most underexplored eras has been the Civil War. It’s a fascinating time. There were laws on the book that actually allowed 10-year-olds marry,” he says. “The police were just beginning to understand forensics at that time. There are a lot of little things that come up in the course of the show about police work, like when the doctor examining a crime scene remarks that animal blood smells different from human blood.”
Even the show’s slangy title is rooted in history. Police began being referred to as “coppers” in Britain in the 19th century and beginning in 1845, the first New York City police badges were made of copper. (But during the time the show takes place badges were actually fashioned from white metal.)
Racial and class tensions give the show’s producers plenty of dramatic fodder. “With the show, you get the sense that the war was not so clear-cut in terms of North and South,” says Levinson. “There’s a lot about American history that we just haven’t explored. The English deal with their history much more than we do.”
All of this makes “Copper” the perfect fit for BBC America, says Cineflix Studio president and executive producer Christina Wayne. She first began developing the series back in 2005, during her tenure at AMC, where she brought “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” to the then-fledgling cable network.
“It works for BBC America because it’s a period piece, and they’re known for those. It’s an American show with American creators set in America but yet many of characters are from different places in the world,” she says. “The lead character, although born in Ireland, is now American. There’s British and German characters. All of these immigrants are thrown together in Five Points, and that had a huge appeal.”
While the show’s 19-century New York is seemingly worlds apart from the present day, Levinson says there are interesting parallels between the periods. “It’s fascinating to realize that the issues our characters faced at that time are the same ones we are struggling with today,” he notes. “The tension between the haves who live uptown with the have-nots, racism and poverty — we’re still dealing with those things. At some point, I think we’re going to be looking more at our history in America and what happened to understand how we got where we are now.”
COPPER
Today, 9 p.m., BBC America