Tribeca

This was a fantastic series of one-hour drama whose only connection was that they took place in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. Perhaps not coincidentally, since running Tribeca has become one of the hottest neighborhoods in Manhattan.

The show was definitely ahead of its time and benefited from the forward thinking of the DeNiro-Rosenthal team. I just wonder why this series was not continued and more episodes made.

Tribeca, or for the sticklers, "TriBeCa," is the Triangle Below Canal, the roughly triangular neighborhood at the lower end of Manhattan bounded by Canal Street on the north, Broadway on the east, and the Hudson River to the west (and the World Trade Center to the south). Robert DeNiro grew up not too far away in Little Italy, so when he decided to make an anthology series about life in the most exciting city in the world, he found the perfect setting among Tribeca's eclectic architecture and lifestyles. The seven episodes of Tribeca showcase a range of human stories uniquely New York. Among the better episodes:

"The Box." A cop (Laurence Fishburne) tries to deal with the death of his older brother, a stockbroker murdered and robbed on his morning run through Battery Park. His tortured efforts to open a puzzle box that his late brother gave him parallel his efforts to find peace with himself. A splendid start for the series, with Fishburne's Emmy Award-winning performance as the anguished cop. Series regular Joe Morton makes his first appearance as a mounted policeman trying to talk his fellow cop out of doing something stupid.

"The Loft." Three teens move to the City and renovate a vacant loft rented to them by the kindly café owner played by Philip Bosco (this was obviously an earlier era since no kids could possibly afford renting in the since gentrified Tribeca). The girl is mistaken for a criminal one night and the two boys spend the night searching for their jailed friend. This provides a great look at the energy that always permeates this city that never sleeps.

"Stepping Back" examines a couple deciding between the aggravating, impersonal, intimate, and always exhilarating pulse of life in the City compared with the isolation and disconnection of the suburbs.

"Honor" tackles the ease with which the homeless are ignored.

Executive producer DeNiro insisted on filming the entire series in New York, and the sense of verisimilitude is overwhelming. This is a series that lets you see New York from the viewpoint of a native, not a tourist. Unfortunately, this great series has not been released on VHS or DVD and is unlikely to be released in the foreseeable future.

Let me take you back to 1993. Here's a roster of people involved with this series:

Joe Morton

Philip Bosco

Eli Wallach

Melanie Mayron

Carl Lumbly

Carol Kane

Richard Lewis

Kevin Spacey (before the Oscars and the ugliness)

and executive produced by Robert de Niro.

You should realize that this show was not like anything on the air at the time; this was unique, even for basic or pay cable channels and definitely not like anything on the other broadcast networks.

Mr. De Niro's Tribeca Film Center had been up and running for a couple of years at this point, and that neighborhood is one of the oldest and most interesting in Manhattan. It was a no-brainer to make a show tailored to the area.

The concept of the program was different, too. This was an anthology series, meaning that the focus for the program changed to different characters and different stories. The two characters that held it all together were Philip Bosco, who owned a central coffee shop/diner called Zadie's, where everybody would eventually come for food and beverage, and a Mounted NYPD officer played by Joe Morton who responded to problems that arose. And I guess you can consider the neighborhood itself as another character that retained that continuity.

Another interesting element was how characters would just turn up - in one episode, they might have been buying a coffee and a sandwich at Zadie's like any rando, just as a matter of course, while another episode, the story was about them! It really attempted to give the feel of the people living in and around the neighborhood, and how a complete stranger one day can suddenly become the main focus on another.

I did leave one name off my roster of people above. Larry Fishburne (as he was still being credited, at this time), actually took home an Emmy Award for his appearance in the series pilot, titled "The Box." This was notable in that the show had been canceled several months before the Emmy Awards ceremony that year, yet Fishburne's performance was still the one the voters selected, a true tribute to both the performance and the writing of that brilliant episode.

New York was in every second of this series, as it was shot on location in the Triangle Below Canal Street. The geography was just as much a part of everything this series offered as those landmarks provided an authentic background for these genuine tales.

The trouble with an anthology series is that you never know what you're going to get. Besides that heavy drama with Mr. Fishburne, there was, for example, a comedy episode with Richard Lewis. And though our lives are mixed with ups and downs, we tend to like our television to be one or the other. It's sad that we couldn't adjust to a program that willingly showed the full palette of emotions, which I think was a major contributor to its early end.