Would You Watch This?

Television, for the most part, sucks. I'm doing my best to unsuck it.

Title: Butch and Moan

Concept: Buddy cop show set in the 1970s

Starring: Tough-guy actor Michael Rooker and former porn star Katie Morgan



Shamus "Butch" McGillicuddy Jr. (Rooker) is a fifth-generation cop in Jersey City, N.J. In 1951, Butch disappears while tracking down a perp in the Garden State Fluorocarbon Factory. Twenty years later, as the factory is being closed by the recently-created U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Butch is found somehow alive at the bottom of a vat of experimental chemicals. Woken from his 20-year coma, he's informed he still needs five more years on the job to get his pension. The detective returns to the force in the strange new world of 1971!

Things aren't any easier back home for Butch, as his hot young wife from 1951 is now going through menopause (by law, this role must be played by Kim Cattrall) and remarried (since Butch was declared legally dead) to his straight-laced, by-the-book police chief (Mitch Pileggi). And the baby boy Butch hasn't seen in 20 years is now a pot-smoking, draft-dodging hippie (the all-grown-up kid from Jerry Maguire, Jonathan Lipnicki). With no where else to go, Butch has to live in the garage.



Butch needs help adjusting to the new rules of modern police work, like Miranda rights and integration, so he's partnered with the JCPD's hotshot up-and-coming detective: Monique Kasatkin (Morgan). Monique has some of the biggest busts -- ha ha, get it? -- in department history. But she's having a tough time breaking into the all-male world of police work circa 1971. It doesn't make things any easier that the other cops call Monique "Moan" because she looks just like stag film star Robin Swallows. It turns out she looks just like her because she indeed was Robin Swallows before being convinced to do something better with her life after a tearful reunion with her father, the tough, lovable and recently widowed Rabbi Mordecai Kasatkin (in a scene-stealing role by Dwight Schultz).

But Moan's home life also is turned upside down when she not only has to share her one-bedroom apartment with her father, but also her ex-husband (and former pimp), Slick Truelove (Shavar Ross, aka Dudley from Diff'rent Strokes). Slick is a wanted fugitive but says he wants to turn his life around -- and if Moan doesn't hide him, he'll tell every cop in the precinct about her sordid past. Complicating matters, Slick gains an unlikely ally when he tells Rabbi Kasatkin he wants to study Torah and convert to Judaism!

With personal lives like these, the mean streets of Jersey City will be a piece of cake!