OTHER TECH

I watched the show when it was first on the air in 2001 and 2002 and have been waiting for it to come to DVD for a long time myself - so it must be satisfying for you to finally have all 19 episodes in one place on DVD. Yeah, it really is. I was so disappointed when the show was taken off the air [in 2002] that I hadn't even watched it again until we were working on the DVDs.

One of the things that struck me was when you said, on one of the commentaries, that The Job was one of the last cop shows that wasn't a procedural. It was more about the people. Exactly. Those other shows are more about the crimes and how they were committed, not the characters.

On The Job, the crime is pretty much secondary, if that. We always said we didn't really care about the particulars of the individual crimes. To us, it was more about our characters.

ABC didn't give you a fair shot - it moved the show around on the schedule. Did you have the option of taking The Job to cable at the outset of the series? It was a thought. But this was [star and co-creator] Denis Leary's first foray into this kind of television, and I think he wanted to make some real money. [both laugh] There's money involved at a network, as opposed to cable.

Given that it was his first experience in this world, I, being the [dramatic pause] wizened veteran, was saying how it was going to be a tough show to make work. So we went to the network and said, "Look, this is the show that we're going to do. If you don't like it, tell us right now, and we won't do it for you. We'll do it someplace else." But they said, "No, no, no," and went with it.

TOUGH STANDARDS Was there much network interference? I wonder, because there are a lot of things on the show that make me think, "Wow, I can't believe they got away with that one!" The thing that I remember most of all was dealing with the Standards and Practices people. It was a constant battle, and I really couldn't get much past them at all.

Here's an example. In "Gay" [Episode 12], where the squad thinks that Frank [Lenny Clarke] is gay, there was a line I wrote saying that he's a glutton, so of course he's going to want to be with different guys - because to him, the world is nothing but a "man-meat buffet." And they said, "No, you can't say 'man-meat buffet.' " I said, "Why not?" Usually, it was their dirty little minds at work. "Man meat" doesn't necessarily mean c--k, you know? But here I am having these daily e-mail exchanges with this middle-aged woman. I would say the great percentage of my time was not taken up with writing or directing or anything else, it was dealing with Standards and Practices.