CBS’ controversial new series — shot behind the scenes at the Brooklyn DA’s office — is supposed to be about the ugly, unforgiving streets of the city’s biggest borough.
But “Brooklyn DA” is as much an advertisement for how different Brooklyn is now — and why more out-of-towners these days are asking how to get to The Promenade instead of the Empire State Building.
Twenty years ago, the homicide rate in Brooklyn was five times higher, Ken Taub, who runs the homicide bureau, tells the camera.
“Places I wouldn’t set foot in are now places I can’t afford to live,” he says.
“Brooklyn DA,” a six-week series that starts Tuesday night (10 p.m. on Ch. 2), is intended as a made-for-TV glimpse at the day-to-day lives of three or four assistant prosecutors. A few of them are even from Brooklyn. The cases they catch are as fresh as this morning’s donuts.
In the show’s first episode, Taub goes back to the stoop in the Cypress Hills section, where Officer Peter J. Figoski was killed responding to a robbery call. The killer was sentenced 45 years in February, the month before filming began.
But Taub was in court just this week making closing arguments to a jury in the case against an alleged accomplice.
Remember the house painter who was busted earlier this month for allegedly stealing more than $100,000 in art from a Long Island Gold Coast mansion? The series was filming Lawrence Oh, a rackets bureau prosecutor, months ago as he arranged a sting on the suspected thief to catch him on camera pilfering more art.
The new-kid prosecutor on “Brooklyn DA” is blond Kathleen Collins, who’s taking her first case to trial for the Sex Trafficking unit. Last year, her unit lost its lead prosecutor amid accusations she had failed to tell the defense about a recanting witness in a heavily publicized rape case (which is not mentioned on the show). Collins’ big case — against an alleged East New York pimp, two years in the making — falls apart at the end of the first episode when the chief accuser turns out to be still selling sex, without the pimp.
In the new Brooklyn, prosecutors drop the charges in court and make reasonable excuses for the bad behavior of the two-timing victim. The cameras do follow the prosecutors a bit into their private lives — Collins at her spin class, Oh at his deli.
The boss of the Brooklyn DA’s office, Charles Hynes, who’s up for election for a record seventh term this fall, makes a fleeting appearance.
His election opponents have called on CBS to halt filming until after the election, which the network declined to do — not least because the series was conceived as a summer show when audiences are smaller.