LOS ANGELES—Calling the exclusion “an embarrassing oversight,” visitors to Grantland today criticized the online sports publication for its notably deficient recap of a recent matchup between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Dallas Mavericks, complaining that the write-up completely omits any mention of NYPD Blue’s enormous influence on the modern ensemble drama format. “Were they even watching the same game?” Grantland reader Jeremy Cortina said of the site’s incomplete recap of last night’s Lakers-Mavericks contest, which failed to make even one reference to the ABC police procedural’s immense impact on such essentials of the canon as The Shield and The Wire. “I went into that article looking for the basics—how NYPD Blue foreshadowed creator David Milch’s later work on Deadwood, instances in which modern ensemble casts have liberally borrowed from the classic on-camera rapport displayed between leads Jimmy Smits and Dennis Franz, and how this gritty crime drama reflected the uncertainties of the Clinton administration. But it’s just a bunch of trivial stuff about stats and injuries, which team won the game, and the David O. Russell film American Hustle. Do they actually think we care about this junk?” Cortina added that he hadn’t been so disappointed in a Grantland article since its recent retrospective of Jackie Robinson’s impact on race relations in baseball failed to attempt even a passing analysis of The Cure’s Disintegration.

Advertisement