Which reporters are in the white house briefing room

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Tuesday transformed what was to be a private negotiating session with Democratic congressional leaders into a bitter televised altercation over his long-promised border wall, vowing to force a year-end government shutdown if they refused to fund his signature campaign promise.

During an extraordinary public airing of hostilities that underscored a new, more confrontational dynamic in Washington, Mr. Trump vowed to block full funding for the government if Democrats refused to allocate money for the wall on the southwestern border, saying he was “proud to shut down the government for border security.”

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leaders, seated on couches flanking Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, took issue with the president’s position and his false assertions about the wall in front of a phalanx of news cameras, imploring him repeatedly to continue the tense conversation without reporters present. But Mr. Trump insisted on a conspicuous clash that undercut Republican congressional leaders and his own staff working to avoid a shutdown at all costs, or at least to ensure that Democrats would shoulder the blame for such a result.

“If we don’t have border security, we’ll shut down the government — this country needs border security,” Mr. Trump declared as the testy back and forth unfolded, and Mr. Schumer reminded the president repeatedly that he had called several times for a shutdown, appearing to goad him into taking responsibility.

“You want to know something?” Mr. Trump finally said, exasperated. “I’ll tell you what: I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck.”

“I will take the mantle,” Mr. Trump went on. “I will be the one to shut it down — I’m not going to blame you for it.”

The scene raised fresh questions about whether Mr. Trump and lawmakers could reach agreement by a Dec. 21 deadline to keep much of the government open, appearing to harden diametrically opposed positions on the wall.

It also showcased the interplay of two politicians playing to very different bases: Mr. Trump appealing to his core anti-immigration supporters and Ms. Pelosi, her party’s nominee for House speaker, to the young liberal lawmakers she needs to keep in her camp ahead of a formal election next month that she must win to secure the gavel.

Aides say Mr. Trump respects what he sees as Ms. Pelosi’s toughness in the political trenches, but he sought on Tuesday to undercut her position by raising questions about her job security. “Nancy’s in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now,” Mr. Trump said at one point, alluding to Ms. Pelosi’s struggle to garner the votes to be elected speaker.

“Please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory,” Ms. Pelosi shot back. She also challenged the president’s strength within his own party, questioning his ability to get the wall funding he is demanding through the Republican-led House. When the president said he could win such a vote “in two seconds,” Ms. Pelosi dared the president: “Then do it.”

Later at the Capitol, Ms. Pelosi spared little venom in privately describing the president’s demeanor to a roomful of colleagues.

“This wall thing” of Mr. Trump’s is “like a manhood thing for him — as if manhood could ever be associated with him,” Ms. Pelosi told fellow Democrats, according to an aide present for the remarks who insisted on anonymity to relay parts of the meeting.

Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer also sparred with Mr. Trump about the financing of the wall, after the president insisted that Mexico would pay for it through money that would flow into the United States as part of a new North American trade agreement. The Democrats told Mr. Trump that that would never happen. Ms. Pelosi said she had told the president that any economic gains from the pact should go to American workers and businesses, not a border wall.

“Well, they’re going to pay for it one way or the other,” Mr. Trump insisted, in Ms. Pelosi’s retelling.

Outside the West Wing after the meeting, Mr. Schumer said Mr. Trump had thrown a “temper tantrum” over the wall, later telling reporters, “You heard the president: He wants a shutdown.”

In a statement shortly afterward, Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi said it was up to Mr. Trump to avert the disaster he had promised, by embracing their proposals to essentially postpone the dispute for another year, either by passing the six noncontroversial spending measures that are outstanding and extending homeland security funding for one year at current levels, or by passing one-year extensions for all seven remaining bills.

The president “said he would think about it,” Mr. Schumer later told reporters.

Despite the public meltdown, Mr. Trump appeared to be open to a way out of the impasse. He called Ms. Pelosi hours after the meeting, she said, and was still reviewing the options that the Democrats had presented. Mr. Trump even went into a lofty speech during the Oval Office session, once reporters had departed, in which he mused about the potential for him to work alongside Democratic leaders in the new Congress to strike great deals.

Gesticulating grandly with Vice President Mike Pence looking on, Mr. Trump told Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi that the new Congress could be the “greatest Congress in the history of Congress,” according to a person familiar with the discussion who described it on the condition of anonymity because it was private. And the president assured them that if they could strike deals that could get through the House, he would compel Republican senators to back them.

On Tuesday, though, such compromises were not in evidence. Mr. Trump’s outburst left Republican congressional leaders in a tricky spot, publicly rejecting a shutdown that their president had promised.

“I hope that’s not where we end up,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, told reporters. “It was a rather spirited meeting we all watched, but I’d still like to see a smooth ending here.”

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said, “My experience has been that shutdowns don’t help anybody.”

Earlier, Mr. Pence — who sat silently through the Oval Office meeting and later traveled to the Capitol to brief Republicans — drew laughter from a roomful of senators when he described the meeting as “memorable” and said, “There appears to be a disagreement.”

The meeting — the first time in more than a year that the pair the president likes to call “Chuck and Nancy” traveled to the White House to negotiate with Mr. Trump — was to be a private session. But Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, later said that Mr. Trump had been “grateful for the opportunity” to place his disagreement with Democrats on display.

Mr. Trump appeared to taunt Mr. Schumer.

“You don’t want to shut down the government, Chuck,” Mr. Trump told his fellow New Yorker, referring to a brief shutdown in January when Democrats insisted that protections for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children must be part of any funding measure. “The last time you shut it down, you got killed.”

Veteran legislators expressed outrage.

“This is the only time I’ve seen anything as irresponsible as a president who says he wants a government shutdown,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who has served for more than 40 years.

[ Mr. Trump made misleading claims about the border wall before and after the meeting with Democrats. ]

The president has suggested, repeatedly, that a shutdown might be necessary to compel Democrats to swallow $5 billion in wall funding. But on Tuesday before the meeting, he had appeared to back off slightly.

In a series of morning tweets, he falsely stated that substantial sections of the “Great Wall” had already been completed, and he suggested that his administration could continue construction whether Democrats funded it or not.

That would be illegal, but it suggested that he was looking for a way to keep the government funded past Dec. 21, even if Democrats balk at wall funding.

“People do not yet realize how much of the Wall, including really effective renovation, has already been built,” Mr. Trump wrote in one of the tweets . “If the Democrats do not give us the votes to secure our Country, the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall. They know how important it is!”

It was not clear what Mr. Trump was referring to. American troops he dispatched to the border on the eve of the midterm congressional elections as part of what the president called an effort to head off a migrant “invasion” have put up concertina wire along existing fences and barriers, but the administration has yet to spend much of the $1.3 billion Congress approved for border security last year. Under restrictions put in place by Congress, none of that money can be used to construct a new, concrete wall of the sort the president has said is vital.

The president does not have the legal authority to spend money appropriated for one purpose on another task, such as wall-building.

Robert Menendez’s education in political corruption came unusually early. In 1982, he turned against his mentor, Mayor William V. Musto of Union City, N.J., the popular leader of their gritty hometown.

Mr. Menendez took the witness stand and testified that city officials had pocketed kickbacks on construction projects, helping to put a man widely seen as his father figure behind bars. Mr. Menendez, then 28, wore a bulletproof vest for a month.

The episode, which Mr. Menendez has used to cast himself as a gutsy Democratic reformer, helped fuel his remarkable rise from a Jersey tenement to the pinnacles of power in Washington as the state’s senior senator. The son of Cuban immigrants, Mr. Menendez broke barriers for Latinos and has used his perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to influence presidents and prime ministers.

But those who have closely followed his career say the years he spent enmeshed in Mr. Musto’s machine also set the tone for another, more sinister undercurrent that now threatens to swallow it — one in which Mr. Menendez became a power broker himself whose own close ties to moneyed interests have repeatedly attracted the scrutiny of federal prosecutors.

Those two sides of his life collided on Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan, where Mr. Menendez, 69, surrendered to face his second bribery indictment in less than a decade.

The explosive charges , unveiled on Friday, accuse the senator and his wife of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for helping increase U.S. assistance to Egypt and trying to throttle a pair of criminal investigations involving New Jersey businessmen. Investigators who searched their suburban home found piles of cash squirreled away, gold bars worth $100,000 and what they described as an ill-gotten Mercedes-Benz.

Mr. Menendez pleaded not guilty on Wednesday and refuses to resign . He has already begun accusing the government of twisting facts to try to criminalize legitimate congressional activity — the same defense that helped him bottle up the last charges in a hung jury.

But interviews with nearly two dozen New Jersey political figures who worked with, watched and fought him, as well as a review of court records stretching back two decades, paint a far more complicated portrait of a man who has been both a pathbreaking legislator of unusual intelligence, and a vindictive politician with a propensity for accepting lavish gifts he could never have afforded on a government salary.

As a measure of how damning the indictment appears, no one — not even a longtime ally recommended by Mr. Menendez’s office — agreed to publicly defend him on the conduct described by prosecutors.

“What we are witnessing is a pattern that developed early and just spun out of control,” said Robert Torricelli, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey who served alongside Mr. Menendez in Washington. “People don’t often change. In a lot of ways, Bob Menendez is still a Union City commissioner in the late 1970s.”

The pervasiveness of corruption in Hudson County, N.J., a dense expanse of blue-collar cities just across the Hudson River from New York City, extends well beyond the 1970s. From Bayonne to North Bergen, mayors, a county executive , state lawmakers and council members alike have gone down on corruption charges.

No one seemed to learn a lesson, especially in Union City: Mr. Musto’s immediate successor, Robert C. Botti, was indicted seven weeks after taking office, and received an 18-month prison sentence .

As corruption charges rained down around him, Mr. Menendez prospered, becoming a master of the kind of back-room deal-making that was dying out in other parts of the country as he rose through elected offices.

Prosecutors have spent the better part of 18 years, the length of Mr. Menendez’s Senate tenure, looking into the blurry lines between his office and special interests. That dubious investigative distinction is approached by no other modern senator.

Many of the suspicions that attracted their attention never amounted to charges, but other facts still raised concerns. He accepted rides on private planes, luxurious vacations, and other perks from wealthy friends while freely using his office to advance their interests, earning a stern rebuke by the bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee in 2018. He helped advance the careers of longtime friends and love interests who remained loyal. And when they crossed him, he did not hesitate to use a deep Rolodex to exact payback.

Mr. Torricelli, who retired amid his own ethics scandal , said he harbored concerns about the senator for years. Yet like other Democrats, he looked the other way, willing to move past suspicions out of personal loyalty, disbelief or appreciation for the liberal political policies Mr. Menendez championed in Congress, from immigration reform to abortion rights.

In recent years, that vacuum allowed the senator to continue burnishing his legacy, even amid a drumbeat of damaging leaks about the latest investigation. His daughter, Alicia Menendez, secured her own weekend show on MSNBC. He helped his son, Robert Menendez Jr., win his old House seat in 2022. And he had taken steps toward running for a fourth term.

Now, after 49 years in public life, all of it is at risk of disintegrating.

“This will be the biggest fight yet,” Mr. Menendez said at a news conference in Union City earlier this week, as he dug in his heels. “Remember, prosecutors get it wrong sometimes. Sadly, I know that.”

‘More of a boss than a politician’

Even for the Senate, filled with high achievers and fast climbers, Mr. Menendez had trained his sights on elected office from an uncommonly young age. He won his first , a seat on the Union City school board, at just 20 after he was told in high school he would have to pay for his own books if he wanted to take honors classes.

A dense knot of factories and inexpensive housing, Union City had long been a magnet for immigrants, and at the time Mr. Menendez was coming of age, refugees fleeing the Cuban Revolution were remaking it into a little Havana. His own parents, a seamstress and carpenter, had come earlier.

But for Mr. Menendez, the timing was just right. The region’s fast-growing Latino population provided the bilingual Democrat a reliable base — sometimes delivering him 75 percent or more of the vote — to fuel a steady ascent.

Mr. Menendez’s election to the school board put him in touch with Mr. Musto, who hired him as an aide while he finished college and law school. He would eventually break with Mr. Musto, testifying at trial and running against him in 1982; Mr. Musto somehow prevailed in that election, held just after he was sentenced to prison. Four years later, Mr. Menendez was elected mayor, and seats in the Assembly, State Senate and then Congress, in 1993, soon followed.

In Washington, he thrived in the halls of the clubby Senate. He serenaded colleagues and longtime supporters on their birthdays in a high baritone and quickly mastered the delicate levers that could hold up nominations and torpedo bills until his priorities were included.

At night, he could often be found at Morton’s steakhouse near the White House, where he billed his campaign accounts $16,000 a year, on average, The New York Post once wrote , enjoying a cigar on the balcony.

With money from Washington, Mr. Menendez is credited with helping realize a light-rail network in Hudson County that moves tens of thousands of people a day, securing billions of dollars in federal aid to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the state in 2012, and more recently, shouldering forward a new rail tunnel beneath the Hudson, the largest public works project in the nation.

He frequently clashed with presidents in his own party on foreign policy. He sharply criticized the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, fought President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and became a one-man wrecking ball in an attempt to stop Mr. Obama from normalizing relations with Cuba .

“Bob labored intensely to master detail,” said James E. McGreevey, a former New Jersey governor who resigned two decades ago in scandal. “He relished both the subject matter and the process, and typically had among the strongest commands.”

But back home, his popularity was also enforced by fear.

“In the beginning yeah, we used to bust each other’s balls — had a lot of fun with him,” said Richard J. Codey, another former governor and longtime state legislator. “As time passed, he started to become more of a boss than a politician.”

In 1999, when he was in Congress, Mr. Menendez effectively ousted a former protégé , Rudy Garcia, as mayor of Union City after Mr. Garcia fired Donald Scarinci, a lawyer who served as city attorney, and who was the then-congressman’s friend since childhood. Mr. Menendez had come to view Mr. Garcia as a possible political threat.

“Bob resented it, and Rudy refused to become totally his alter-ego, like some others,” said Joseph Doria, a Hudson County Democrat who served as speaker of the assembly. “They had a big war.”

Another fight erupted in 2004, when the mayor of Jersey City recruited Steven Fulop to try to primary Mr. Menendez. Mr. Fulop, an Iraq War veteran and Goldman Sachs analyst in his 20s, had no shot at winning, but the Jersey City mayor wanted to send a message to Mr. Menendez, a political rival.

Mr. Menendez was furious. He called the home phone of the Goldman managing director who was handling government relations around the construction of the bank’s massive new tower in his district in Jersey City at the time. The managing director, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the previously unreported episode, recalled Mr. Menendez’s screams. He said he later called Mr. Menendez back to assure him the bank had been unaware of Mr. Fulop’s campaign.

A spokesman for Mr. Menendez disputed on Tuesday that the call ever happened.

In an interview, Mr. Fulop said he was promptly summoned by the head of Goldman’s human resources department and was told, “we don’t run primaries against sitting congressmen.” He worried he would lose his job, but did not, and stayed in the race and lost. He is now mayor of Jersey City himself, and is running for governor.

“I don’t think anyone would ever classify Bob Menendez as a beacon of morals and ethics,” said Mr. Fulop, who later reconciled with Mr. Menendez then fell out with him anew. “That was never how he built his career.”

A new senator, an indictment and a ‘resurrection’

Mr. Menendez’s ascension to the Senate in 2006 was the culmination of a dream he had harbored since he was a teenager. But no sooner had he moved across the Capitol than federal prosecutors in New Jersey began investigating.

Their interest centered , at first, on North Hudson Community Action Corporation, a nonprofit that paid Mr. Menendez some $300,000 over nine years in rent at the same time he helped secure the group millions of dollars in federal grants. Prosecutors wanted to know if the payments were market rate.

Mr. Menendez was initially appointed to the Senate to fill the seat vacated by Jon Corzine when he became governor, and he was running for a full term that fall when news of a subpoena for the nonprofit leaked. The senator denied any wrongdoing and accused the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Chris Christie, of political high jinks to help his Republican opponent.

But the investigation opened the door to federal scrutiny that would follow Mr. Menendez almost continually in the Senate, as prosecutors scrutinized suspicious dealings involving a mix of romantic interests, Hudson County developers and new friends with vast resources.

Many of Mr. Menendez’s longtime political allies said they were surprised only by the luridness of the most recent charges, but not the idea that he would accept gifts from wealthier friends. Despite his growing political clout, Mr. Menendez remained one of the poorest members of the Senate — having never officially earned much more than a government paycheck.

“You’re dealing with people around you who need you and want you who are multimillionaires,” Mr. Codey said, adding: “The temptation is too much.”

By 2007, scrutiny fell on his relationship with Kay LiCausi , a former aide almost two decades his junior whom he was widely reported to be dating. (He had divorced his wife, a teacher, in 2005.) After she left his office, Mr. Menendez helped Ms. LiCausi secure lucrative consulting contracts with Democratic groups. She also began working for companies and organizations with ties to the senator who needed his help in Washington. He again denied any misconduct.

An executive for a company trying to develop a billion-dollar mall and entertainment complex in the Meadowlands later testified to a grand jury that he hired Ms. LiCausi to lobby because of her connections to Mr. Menendez. After the senator helped with an Army Corps of Engineers permit for the project, the executive testified, he was asked to raise $50,000 for Mr. Menendez’s campaign, Bloomberg News reported in 2015 based on court documents.

Prosecutors closed the investigation in 2011 without bringing charges. The next year, the senator caused a stir when he objected to the nomination of an appeals court judge whose longtime partner worked on the investigation. He said it was not political, and under pressure from the White House, he eventually relented.

Unharmed by the yearslong saga, Mr. Menendez easily won a second term that fall, rising to the Foreign Relations chairmanship.

But the reprieve would only be short-lived: just days before Mr. Menendez took the gavel, the F.B.I. raided the office of Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye surgeon who Mr. Menendez counted among his closest friends.

It took two years to bring charges, but in 2015, Mr. Menendez became the first sitting senator in a generation to be charged with federal bribery.

The indictment painted a deeply unsavory portrait of his Senate office, where his chief of staff helped solicit gifts and track what Dr. Melgen needed. Prosecutors said that Mr. Menendez went to great personal lengths, lobbying other high-ranking government officials to help resolve a multimillion-dollar Medicare billing dispute and to protect the surgeon’s business interests in the Dominican Republic. The senator also helped his friend’s foreign girlfriends obtain travel visas to the United States, they said.

Dr. Melgen was generous in return, with $700,000 in donations to support the senator’s campaigns and the kind of luxury travel Mr. Menendez could scarcely have imagined as a younger man: rides on a private plane, stays at a Dominican villa and a Paris hotel.

Mr. Menendez’s lawyers did not dispute most of the actions; they cast them not as corruption, but the fruits of a decades-old friendship and the senator’s policy interests. Prosecutors had another unforeseen challenge: Between their indictment and the trial in 2017, the Supreme Court had issued a landmark decision raising the bar the government needed to meet to prove political corruption.

The trial ended in a hung jury just before Thanksgiving 2017. When Mr. Menendez stepped outside of the federal courthouse in Newark, he declared his “resurrection day” — and revenge.

At the time, Democrats played down the seriousness of the charges and largely hung with him, in part because Mr. Christie was governor and could have appointed a fellow Republican to fill a vacant seat. Mr. Menendez limped to re-election in 2018, largely on the strength of anti-Trump backlash, according to Democrats involved in the party’s races.

“In New Jersey, we have been willing to overlook a lot for people who believe in the same values we do,” said Loretta Weinberg, who served as majority leader of the State Senate.

For Mr. Menendez, the victories papered over a what had been an exceedingly painful period in his life. His fiancée, Alicia Mucci, broke off their engagement on the eve of the bribery trial, years after he proposed in the Capitol Rotunda, she said in a brief interview. He moved out and, as a bachelor once again his 60s, was a regular at Fornos of Spain, just a few blocks from the courthouse.

It was only a few months later, prosecutors say, that Mr. Menendez began dating Nadine Arslanian, the woman who would become his wife and soon introduce him to key figures whose fates are now intertwined with his in court.

Jack Begg

New York City, perhaps more than any other place on earth, harbors large pockets of people who brag about being too busy to watch TV. Many of them are lying — at least a little. On average, 54.4 million Americans tune in every night, remember. Some of them are even card-carrying intellectuals who, if they haven’t graduated yet to a 60-inch screen with wall projection and Dolby sound, nevertheless keep a little cable-ready Sony wedged up there in the bookcase, next to Rilke and Heidegger. If you’re telling the truth, though — if you really haven’t looked lately — you should give it another chance. You’re missing out on something. TV is actually enjoying a sort of golden age — it has become a medium you can consistently rely on not just for distraction but for enlightenment.

I should quickly explain here that by TV I don’t mean all TV, or even most of it. I don’t mean the tabloid exposes of Sally, Ricki, Geraldo and the rest. I don’t mean the sitcoms, which, with a few exceptions like “Home Improvement,” seem increasingly devoted to the theme of dysfunction and to be stuck on the premise of cramming as many unlike people as possible into a single household. I don’t mean the prime-time soaps, like “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills 90210,” though I watch them faithfully.

And I especially don’t mean highbrow TV like “Masterpiece Theater,” with its attempts to translate three-decker Victorian novels onto the tube. As last season’s “Martin Chuzzlewit” demonstrated — not to mention the disastrous “Middlemarch” of the season before — TV, no matter how well intentioned or generously budgeted, probably isn’t capable of successfully dramatizing such large-scale literary creations, at least not in just a few hourly installments. In the case of “Chuzzlewit,” great chunks of the plot fell out, and the characters, even one-dimensional types like Pecksniff, turned into caricatures of themselves; it was Dickens’s illustrator, Cruikshank, rather than Dickens himself, who became the real inspiration for the series. George Eliot fared even worse. What disappeared in Andrew Davies’s TV adaptation of “Middlemarch” was not just the usual “complexity” but politics (one of the big themes in the novel) and — astonishingly — sex. Rosamond became a simp, not a predator, and Casaubon was so desiccated in Patrick Malahide’s characterization that his slimy reptilian side — the side that was interested in Dorothea for more than just her footnoting ability — was all but lost sight of.

The TV shows I have in mind are the weekly network dramatic series. These shows are flourishing in a way that they haven’t since the very early days of the medium, and have grown in depth and sophistication into what might be thought of as a brand-new genre: call it the prime-time novel.

To watch network TV still requires a fair amount of patience. Even when you tune in to the best shows you have to endure the constant onslaught of commercial interruptions, and commercials, it has to be said, have not improved over the years. (It helps if you picked up the television habit back in your childhood, during those blissful, cartoon-saturated Saturday mornings spent in front of the old cathode-ray-tubed RCA, while your mother banged the vacuum around your feet and sighed about all the fresh air you were missing — you learned how to tune out.) Yet for all its commercialism, network TV now is less under the thumb of the money men than either the movies or the Broadway theater, if only because with any given episode there’s so much less at stake financially. TV, as a result, is frequently more daring and less formulaic than either the stage or the big screen, both of which have to make back huge investments very quickly. Television can afford to take chances, and often enough it does. And TV of late has, ironically, become much more of a writer’s medium than either movies or Broadway, which are more and more preoccupied with delivering spectacle of one kind or another. (TV is more of a writer’s medium than a lot of magazines, for that matter.)

This state of affairs has come about not through any great wisdom or cultural aspirations on the part of the executives who run the networks — these people have M.B.A.’s, after all, not degrees in comp lit. It has happened, rather, because of the very nature of the medium (spectacle doesn’t show up well on the small screen, and it’s too expensive anyway) and because of the almost accidental fact that the people who create and who produce most shows are also the people who write them, or else they’re former writers. In any case, it’s generally the writers, not the directors or the editors, who have the final cut. Think of what Hollywood would be like if the novelist Richard Price, say, got to tell Spike Lee what to do.

TV will never be better than reading, thank goodness. It’s hard to imagine a tube, however small, that could approximate the convenience and portability — the companionability — of a book. And images and spoken words, no matter how eloquent, lack the suggestiveness, the invitation to something deeper, of words on a page. But on television these days, if you listen hard enough, you can often hear dialogue of writerly quality — dialogue, that is, that’s good enough to be in a book. And there are ways in which TV has actually taken over some of the roles that books used to fill. A few of the more inventive TV series, for example, have become for our era the equivalent of the serial novel, unfolding epic stories installment by installment, and sweeping all of us up in shared anxiety and in a lot of group sighing and head shaking over what fate or (it’s the same thing) the author has in store.

TV drama is also one of the few remaining art forms to continue the tradition of classic American realism, the realism of Dreiser and Hopper: the painstaking, almost literal examination of middle- and working-class lives in the conviction that truth resides less in ideas than in details closely observed. More than many novels, TV tells us how we live now.

Much of the TV drama I’m talking about — shows like “E.R.,” “Chicago Hope,” “Homicide: Life in the Streets,” “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” “Law and Order,” “Picket Fences” and the lamentably canceled “My So-Called Life” — is rooted in the formulas set down in the earliest days of the medium: the cop show, for example, or the doc show. The first generation of great TV writers, the Gore Vidals and Paddy Chayefskys, consciously based their work on literary models, and on classical dramatic principles in particular. The current generation is no less literary (“Homicide” ‘s Henry Bromell used to write short stories for The New Yorker), but to a considerable extent the best new shows owe their form and content to nothing other than TV itself. You could make a case, I suppose, that the great innovation of contemporary TV — the device, first used by “Hill Street Blues” in 1981, of telling several stories at once — was inspired at least in part by Elmer Rice’s 1929 play, “Street Scene,” which simultaneously told the stories that unfolded in a single day in the life of several families living in a New York tenement. You could also argue, much more convincingly, that some of the better writing on the good shows now could never have happened without the example of novelists like Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins. The real influence, however, is simply earlier cop and doc shows like “Naked City” and “Ben Casey,” whose tricks the latest crop of writers have borrowed and whose formulas they’ve enriched and complicated. Many of these shows, in fact, work by combining several familiar TV genres: doc show plus soap opera, for example (“E.R.”), or cops-and-robbers plus midlife-crisis comedy (“N.Y.P.D. Blue”).

What’s surprising is that by operating within the ancient conventions, and sometimes right at the very edges of them, these shows often manage a considerable degree of originality. And they frequently attain a kind of truthfulness, or social seriousness, that movies, in particular, seem to be shying away from these days. A TV executive I know is fond of pointing out that an issue-oriented film like “Silkwood” or “Norma Rae” could not be made today, that nobody would finance such a project; his implication is that people who care about radiation and about the labor movement are now working for TV instead of for Hollywood. In truth, TV might not make “Silkwood” or “Norma Rae” either, and yet in some series characters like Norma Rae and Karen Silkwood would not seem the least out of place.

FEW SHOWS HAVE EVER BEEN AS ISSUE-ORIENTED AS “LAW AND Order” (NBC, Wednesday night). Its seriousness, in fact — its way of looking at contemporary issues from several sides at once — is what most recommends this program, which in other respects has an almost antediluvian quality. No jumpy, hand-held-camera shots, that is; no overlapping dialogue; no complicated ensemble plots. Each episode proceeds in a stately Aristotelian fashion, following the two-part formula invoked by the introductory voice-over: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.”

Apparently unburdened by personal lives, the detectives here (played by Jerry Orbach and Benjamin Bratt) wear nice suits and topcoats and drink their coffee out of mugs, not out of those Grecian-frieze paper cups that have become a signature detail on some of the hipper shows. And they go about their business in an efficient, bantering manner, an updated version of the style that prevailed on the old Jack Webb “Dragnet.” The district attorneys, on the other hand (Jill Hennessy and a boyishly tousled Sam Waterston), quiver with conviction and with passion for justice, and have to be periodically brought to earth by an avuncular old counselor (Steven Hill).

What these characters (the lawyers especially) mostly do is talk. They talk about “perps” and victims and witnesses, naturally, but they also talk a lot about rights and about the system and about the urgent and sometimes unresolvable dilemmas that the writers send their way with such uncanny regularity. “Law and Order” depends on stories more than characters, and it’s known in the industry for its speed in responding to real-life events and incorporating them into the show’s plots; sometimes it takes as little as eight weeks for a script to be developed and to make its way onto the air. Last season alone there were stories involving abortion rights and affirmative action; a murder, very similar to a famous Westchester case, in which a young man, suffering an alcoholic blackout, killed two people he mistakenly took to be his parents, and the apprehension and conviction of a Katherine Ann Power-like fugitive (who, in a nice touch, was represented by William Kunstler himself, his shaggy gray locks streaming behind him and his glasses perched unslippably on that majestic furrowed dome). Still unresolved (though a solution has been promised this season) is a two-year-old murder case eerily reminiscent of the Malcolm X assassination. This one also includes characters modeled on Louis Farrakhan and Coretta Scott King. It has raised the specter of race riots in New York, and turns on the issue of a lone gunman versus a conspiracy of shooters. It has everything except the Michigan militia.

THE VERY BEST OF THE TV DRAMAS, HOWEVER, AREN’T QUITE AS earnest and explicit as “Law and Order” tends to be; they’re informative in another, more subliminal way. For instance, if you watch enough “E.R.,” the hit show set in the busy emergency ward of a Chicago hospital (NBC, Thursday night), you can, without even knowing it, learn a lot about medicine. I’d like to think that in a personnel shortage I could pitch right in. Let’s say you were to come speeding down the corridor right now on a gurney (the show does great gurney shots, tracking the ceiling lights overhead and the dramatic moment when those swinging double doors pop open), and let’s say you were “presenting” with, oh, an aluminum rod sticking through your chest, the way one poor guy was in an episode directed last season by Quentin Tarantino. From hours of watching, I know that the first thing to do is to get a “line” — an IV — into you and to order up a 125-milligram Solumedrol push. And let’s have, what the heck, 5 of morphine. That should make you feel better right away. (The best way to install a line, by the way, is to use a No. 16 needle; pull the skin tight, so the veins don’t roll, and go in slow.)

All right, let’s type and crossmatch, let’s get a blood gas, and I want chest film. Come on, let’s move! I can’t remember whether it’s the McGill forceps or the Foley catheter I’m supposed to use to remove the bar, but I’m not going to worry about that right now, because I’ve got a little problem here. Your B.P. is 50 over 30 and, oops, the monitor is starting to beep. Better give me some “epi,” stat, and — sorry, I forgot to do this earlier — I’ve got to tube you and bag you so we can clear a passage and force a little air into your lungs. Oh no! You’re flat-lining! Clear, everybody, I’m going to use the paddles! O.K., let’s try that again! I’m charging. Now . . . clear! Whap! Nothing? All right, all right — I’m going in! I’m just going to make a little incision here, and I’m going to spread a couple of ribs, and I’m going to massage your heart. Nothing to it — I do this all the time. . . .

Well, you get the idea. You’ll be going home, by the way, in less than an hour. Though “E.R.” follows the “Hill Street”-honed formula of overlapping several self-contained plots with one or more longer-running stories that take several weeks to unfold, it somehow manages a nearly opposite effect with time. Instead of slowing TV time down, as “Hill Street” did, and making it resemble novelistic time, a typical episode of “E.R.” crams into 48 minutes so much incident and so many people that the effect is a kind of hyper-reality, an adrenaline rush. “E.R.” has lots of compelling characters: Dr. Benton, the intense, dignified black surgeon who can cure everything, it seems, except his own inner hurt; Dr. Greene, the sensitive resident whose marriage is falling apart and whose career suddenly looked bleak after he botched a delivery; Dr. Ross, the womanizing pediatrician; Nurse Hathaway, troubled and depressed and for a while sneaking too many pills from the drug cabinet. But mostly we get to know them not, as on the old “St. Elsewhere” — which used to be the state-of-the art medical drama — by spending a lot of quality time, so to speak, hanging out with them, but, rather, by catching up with them in snatches as they race from one crisis to the next. The result, often, is a kind of intensity delivered on the run.

A small episode in last season’s finale, involving an end-stage AIDS patient, his mother and his lover, and their letting him go, can’t have taken up more than a few minutes of air time; yet in its brevity and directness, and in the honesty of its details, it was a more affecting evocation of the AIDS crisis than Jonathan Demme’s overblown “Philadelphia,” say. Its power came from the fact that this little moment happened in the middle of a lot of other moments — almost as in life. Similarly, a brief, silent stretch at the end of the botched-delivery episode, when Dr. Greene, exhausted, fighting tears, rides the El home in a cold winter dawn, achieved a remarkably understated eloquence. The show has a knack for dramatizing private moments — for sneaking up on them when both we and the characters are most worn down and vulnerable.

But the real reason for “E.R.” ‘s success, I think, is that it recognizes that such private moments are so few and so hasty, and that most of us are overinvolved in an activity that has traditionally been given short shrift on TV, and in print and on the movie screen as well. I mean work, of course. In movies these days, if people have jobs at all it’s in fields like architecture or publishing — professions, it would seem, that don’t demand you do very much. In contemporary American novels, what people mostly do, besides sort out their relationships, is write or teach. Not the least of the qualities recommending Richard Ford’s new novel, “Independence Day,” is that, for a change, the protagonist actually goes to the office every day and toils at an ordinary middle-class desk job — or desk-and-car job. (He’s a real-estate agent.)

Work, along with class, has somehow become an overlooked little secret in a lot of American art, popular or high, something to be avoided or ignored. Robert Benton’s “Nobody’s Fool” is one of the few recent Hollywood movies with a working-class theme, and though it was in many ways a careful and thoughtful effort, by casting Paul Newman as the story’s hero, a hard-drinking underemployed construction worker, it inevitably invested blue-collar life with a sheen of glamour. Newman’s work clothes looked like something he had ordered from the Lands’ End catalogue.

TV sitcoms like “Roseanne” and “Married With Children” have lately embraced both work and class, offering us a raucous, newly liberated view of blue-collar family life. But shows like “E.R.” have gone one step further. They’ve remembered that for a lot of us work is where we live most of the time; that, like it or not, our job relationships are often as intimate as our family relationships, and that work is often where we invest most of our emotional energy. Even if we don’t work in hospitals or in station houses, we can recognize these TV workplaces as being very similar to our own — with their annoyances and reassuring rituals, crises and the endless time between filled with talk of everything and nothing.

THE WORKPLACE WHERE I’VE found myself most at home lately — after my day job, that is — is the 15th Precinct, the home of “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” the Emmy winner created by Steven Bochco and David Milch, who also worked together on “Hill Street Blues.” (Bochco, now the chief guru of TV drama, has to his own credit such ground-breaking shows as “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and “L.A. Law,” not to mention the short-lived turkey “Bay City Blues” and the unspeakable “Cop Rock.”) “N.Y.P.D. Blue” (ABC, Tuesday night) is filmed almost entirely in Hollywood, but by using some well-chosen New York City exteriors and just a few station-house sets — a poorly lighted stairwell, a squad room, a room where suspects are interviewed and a dingy men’s room (where many of the most intimate and revealing scenes take place) — the show has managed to evoke the authentic look and feel of New York and its police force.

“N.Y.P.D. Blue” is full of cases, many of them based on the recollections of Bill Clark, a retired New York City detective who works as a consultant on the program and has also collaborated with Milch on a book about the series’ beginnings. The show has perfected the old “Hill Street” formula of braiding into one 48-minute installment one or two self-contained subplots and a longer story that may take several episodes to unfold, so that the viewer is simultaneously satisfied and left hanging. In any given week the show overflows with narrative — stories about “skels,” “mungo guys,” junkies, rapists and thieves, and about the private lives of the cops who pursue them.

It is not plot, however, that drives the show as much as it is characters, in particular Andy Sipowicz, the bald, thick-chested, volatile but repressed detective who, in Dennis Franz’s masterly portrayal, has invested both the wisecrack and the slow burn with a rare kind of eloquence. Franz, it should be noted, is not exactly breaking new ground here: this is the 27th time he has played a cop. According to Milch, everyone on the set marvels at how little he needs to prepare for his scenes, how he never has to think about them. Effortlessness, or the appearance of effortlessness, is actually a hallmark of the best TV acting, as opposed to movie acting, in which so often we’re meant to see (or, at any rate, are never allowed to forget) the personality of the actor underneath the role. Think of Meryl Streep in just about any of her pictures or, at another extreme, Bruce Willis in just about any of his. Franz is Sipowicz, and the difference is that TV allows him to inhabit the role in ways that the big screen would not — in dozens and dozens of small moments, for example, and by reacting to other characters as well as by being the focus of a scene. Sometimes, for minutes on end, all he does is listen — in anger or disbelief or with enormous weariness. The difference, in its way, is as great as the difference between screen acting and stage acting.

Over the last two years, I’ve come to think of Andy almost as a friend — someone I know nearly as well as the people I actually work with, somebody I can count on. But his character’s centrality hasn’t always been so clear. In the first season it was Sipowicz’s sidekick, John Kelly, the straight-shooting heartthrob played by the orange-haired David Caruso, who commanded most of the attention. And when, at the end of that year, Caruso and the producers parted over a contract dispute, a lot of viewers feared that the show’s chemistry would be irreparably altered.

From Milch’s book, “True Blue: The Real Stories Behind N.Y.P.D. Blue,” it emerges that, in fact, he, Bochco and virtually everyone in the cast were glad to be rid of Caruso, who had become a prima donna. It also turns out that Jimmy Smits, who replaced Caruso, had been Bochco’s first choice all along. In any event, we needn’t have worried, though the show cleverly toyed with our anxieties by incorporating them into the plot of last season’s premiere: Sipowicz immediately began to protest to Lieutenant Fancy, the boss of the 15th, that he and his new partner would never get along. “Don’t get me started,” he says at one point, explaining what’s wrong with the new guy. “It’s a whole attitude. ‘How you doin’?’ — this type of thing.”

The matter began to be resolved in a conversation about pets, of all things — one of those dialogues that “N.Y.P.D. Blue” does with such ease and confidence, in which the writers seem, without stepping out of character, to be winking slightly at the viewer, as if to say, “Don’t miss this!” Sipowicz’s new partner, Detective Bobby Simone (Smits), whom we have discovered to be the sensitive-loner type, talks about his racing pigeons and their ability to find their way home across long distances. Sipowicz, who raises tropical fish, says: “I got a clown-fish couple just had eggs. In the morning while I’m having coffee, that male cleans each egg with his mouth. He never breaks one. The whole day while I’m working, him and his wife guard that nest and fan water over their eggs.” He pauses and looks at Simone. “Those are dedicated fish. You see that kind of thing in pigeons?”

What makes Sipowicz so affecting — and so funny — is not just his lumbering dignity but the fact that we have seen him change. Down a long corridor of Tuesday nights, we’ve watched him struggle with the bottle, with rage (especially in cases involving children) and with his own barely concealed racism and homophobia. We’ve seen him make peace with his estranged son, and we’ve seen him, with agonizing slowness and one terrifying drunken slip-up, fall in love with, move in with, and even propose to and marry, Sylvia Costas, the long-suffering assistant district attorney whom he insulted in the show’s very first episode after she failed to convict a mobster he had arrested and then implied that the problem, in part, was that Sipowicz had lied on the stand. (When she upbraids him, his response is to grab his crotch.)

And it’s not just Sipowicz who changes, of course. Detective Medavoy, a bundle of nerdish anxieties, becomes, after an uncharacteristic moment of boldness, more and more silent, flushed and awkwardly neurotic, and eventually blows his romance with the sultry but bighearted station-house receptionist, Miss Abandando. Detective Martinez, the young rookie, screws up his courage over an entire season and is eventually rewarded by getting a date with Detective Lesniak. Lieutenant Fancy and his younger brother, who are black, quarrel and then reconcile over the issue of how best to get along in a police force run by white folks.

All these alterations, some great, some small, happen incrementally, over weeks of episodes — the way such things happen in life, and not the way they typically happen in movies, for example, or even in books. To think of a character in recent American fiction who actually evolves this way — who ages and changes before our eyes — you may have to go back to Harry Angstrom, in Updike’s “Rabbit” novels. In so many contemporary books, you get just a few days or weeks in the lives of the characters, or a year or two at most. There isn’t room enough for a whole lot to happen.

Milch, who as an undergraduate at Yale studied writing with Robert Penn Warren, has said on several occasions that Warren’s greatest lesson was that the secret subject of any story is what we learn, or fail to learn, over time. And it’s time — hours and hours of it, stretched out over a 22-week season — that is both the great advantage of “N.Y.P.D. Blue” (compared with the two or three hours at most that are available to plays or to movies) and its great discovery. The show uses time the way serial novels used to, incorporating the intervals between installments, and the tension between what we’ve learned and what we fear or hope, into the experience of the story itself.

I had several morning-after conversations last year with a friend of mine, another faithful viewer, about whether or not Simone’s new girlfriend, Detective Russell, was a secret alcoholic — discussions not dissimilar, I imagine, to the ones serial readers must have had in 1841 while they waited for the news about what had happened to Dickens’s Little Nell.

The first time they met, didn’t she have a wine cooler with lunch?

Yes, but if she were a man would you have even noticed? Why can’t a woman have a drink on TV without everyone’s suspecting something?

All right, then why is she always going into the bathroom and locking the door? Answer that. Sipowicz thinks she has a problem.

Sipowicz is in A.A., remember? People in A.A. think everybody is a drunk.

Like most people — like Bobby Simone himself, in fact — I guessed the truth a week or two before I knew it for certain, and the slow unraveling only served to heighten the poignancy.

The other trick “N.Y.P.D. Blue” may have learned from the serial novel, and from Dickens in particular, is that lesser characters can sometimes claim center stage without necessarily taking on new attributes. They can do it, in fact, by simply becoming truer to their limited natures, as happened last season with Medavoy and Abandando, who, as Milch says, took even the writers by surprise. Nobody was prepared for this unlikely romance, or for how low the self-immolating Medavoy would eventually sink. “N.Y.P.D. Blue” has erased some of the traditional boundaries between subplot and main plot — the show is all one big plot that takes weeks and weeks to resolve — but it has also learned how to play characters who change against those who cannot. It has learned, in fact, a great Dickensian lesson: it is in the nature of adversity to turn most of us into caricatures.

E.R.” AND “N.Y.P.D. Blue” are still TV shows, to be sure. People occasionally die on “E.R.,” but more often they get better; in any case, few suffer much. The wards are always humming, the nurses and orderlies cheerful and polite. Nobody is seen paying a bill, or even filling out an insurance form, for that matter. And the cases on “N.Y.P.D. Blue” are almost always “cleared,” as the cops say, and most often not by means of tedious, time-consuming legwork but, rather, by the much more efficient expedient of picking up a couple of skels and then playing good cop-bad cop with them until they break down and confess. I’ve never seen anybody on this show exercise his constitutional right and clam up until he can consult a lawyer.

It almost goes without saying that neither “E.R.” nor “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” for all their daring in other ways (“N.Y.P.D.,” in particular, has repeatedly pushed the network censors way over the usual line when it comes to language and nudity), has dramatized one of the most basic and elemental acts of private life in America — namely, TV watching itself. Except for Sipowicz (who shoots the tube out one night in a drunken rage), nobody on these shows seems to even own a television set; I’ve never seen a character looking at one, not even the poor sick kids, bored silly, in the “E.R.” children’s ward. (They have to make do with Gameboys instead.)

The only way TV makes its presence known in these prime-time dramas is in the form of newspeople pushing their way into the station-house lobby or clamoring, vulturelike, outside the emergency-room entrance; in all of these confrontations, the camera is always seen as an antagonist, a disrupter of business and a falsifier of truth. In one episode of “Homicide: Life on the Street” — the innovative cop drama that the film director Barry Levinson is the co-producer of — the show’s writers even experimented with the device of having obnoxious newscasters, with hand-held cameras, seem to waylay the characters with pointless questions between scenes.

The failure of TV drama to take itself into account is one of the great oddities of the medium. It’s only on the comedies like “Roseanne” that the characters regularly do what the rest of us do: come home, give a quick wave to the spouse and the kids and then grab the newspaper to see what’s on that night.

The most realistic TV family of all, of course, is Homer and Marge and the gang: the Simpsons, who not only put in hours in front of the tube, while pizza crusts and spent soda and beer cans mount up around them, but have formed most of their ideas about the world from what they see on television. TV may, in fact, be all that holds the Simpson family together.

Watching television is in many ways a private, solitary activity — almost like reading. But watching television is also what we do as a nation; millions and millions of us tune in together, like Homer and Marge, at the same time, to the same shows. Television is something, maybe the only thing, that all of us have in common. In my own case, I was never so grateful for TV as when, during a period in my life not long ago, I was working at a job that required me to spend 12 or 14 hours a day reading, or else talking to people about what they had written. By the time I got home, cranky and bleary-eyed, my wife and children were often asleep, but my faithful companion in the den never failed to brighten at my arrival. It gave me the news and the scores, sang all the new songs to me and generally kept me abreast of all the life I was missing. Most of all it told me stories. When I went back to work the next day I had something to talk about — how Andy was doing, whether Doc Greene and his wife would get back together — and I felt connected.

It’s tempting to imagine a time when TV, which is one of the things routinely blamed for the breakup of the American family, could bring us all together again, the way it did a few years ago when we paused as a nation to consider who really killed J. R. TV could give us the news not just by reporting but by telling us even better, more affecting stories and by introducing us to richer, more complicated characters, about whom we could care even more deeply. It could happen.

But I’m not holding my breath. Like most viewers, I’ve been anxiously and hopefully watching the early installments of Bochco’s new masterwork, “Murder One,” which is supposed to be TV drama at its most artful yet. It’s still too early to say for sure, but I already have glum forebodings. Taking on contemporary social issues is one thing, but do we really want to be reminded of the O. J. case for 18 more weeks?

And much about the show suggests that Bochco et al. may have entered a baroque, mannerist phase: the portentous, harpsichord-like theme song; the dark palette and Rembrandt-esque shadows; even Daniel Benzali, the show’s star, who with his enormous smooth head resembles a kind of giant, middle-aged putto — a cherub grown old and overripe. “Murder One” raises the awful possibility that TV, without our even knowing it, may already have passed through its golden age and be embarked upon a descent into self-consciousness and affectation. Or, worse, that TV, if it’s good, is good when nobody expects too much of it. HE MADE IT ALL POSSIBLE

There was a time, before Steven Bochco, when TV writers weren’t such a big deal. The star was king. Then came “Hill Street Blues,” whose executive producer was Bochco. Prime-time adult drama was transformed. One prominent writer of TV drama puts it this way: “Steven Bochco made what we do possible.”

One morning last summer, Bochco sat in his office on the lot of 20th Century Fox, the scripts for his new show, “Murder One,” waiting to be picked up outside his office door. Wearing jeans and a white shirt, and gently tossing a nerf football in the air, he offers his own view of the impact that the cop show set on the fictional Hill made on prime-time television: ” ‘Hill Street’ just put more information on the screen, frame by frame. Each frame was just loaded with more information than anyone had seen on a television show before. Up until that point there really hadn’t been that kind of complex serialization.”

Bochco, 52 and white haired, is thin, with the look of a man who is tougher than his unscuffed white tennis shoes let on. He takes a call, ending it with, “And you can tell him, I said so.” He hangs up and is back in the conversation, sharing the credit of his achievement. “I’ve never been a one-man band,” he says. “A television series is almost never the product of one writer locked in a room, banging out pages. It just doesn’t work that way. That’s a very romantic view of writing — in fact, it’s certainly the view of writing that I always had growing up, wanting to be a writer.”

Bochco grew up wanting to be a writer on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He read novels by William Styron and Philip Roth, and, like a lot of kids who wanted to be writers at the time, he was entranced by J. D. Salinger. At 17, he had his first story rejected by The New Yorker. “I was not a voracious reader,” he says, and it’s clear that even now his stories come less from literary sources than from the tabloidesque machinations of the gut. He studied to be a playwright at Carnegie Tech, but then succumbed to the lure of film and left school briefly for Hollywood, where he talked his way into a job reading scripts for $50 a week, cash.

In 1966, after completing school on an M.C.A. writing fellowship, he was hired as an apprentice writer at Universal Television, where he began composing everything from extra lines to extra scenes and ended up writing episodes for shows like “Name of the Game,”, “McMillan and Wife,” “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “Columbo.” “Hill Street Blues” marked the point in his line of credits when the journeyman became an auteur.

“It was the first time I was doing something that I felt passionate about,” he says. “I wasn’t working on someone else’s idea. So any time you sat down at the typewriter you were able to create a voice. You owned those characters. It just made such a difference.”

One of the writers on “Hill Street Blues” (and later its executive producer) was David Milch, co-creator, with Bochco, of “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and creative consultant on “Murder One.” The speech about civility and the law that the high-powered lawyer, name Ted Hoffman, delivers in the bar to a drunk in “Murder One” ‘s premiere episode is classic Milch.

Bochco doesn’t want to talk about writing for “Murder One” on this particular morning. But he will gladly recall a favorite Milch-written moment from “N.Y.P.D. Blue”: “We did an episode, it was a wonderful story about a guy that we arrested for a killing, a cabdriver killing. So, first you gotta talk the guy into thinking he shouldn’t have a lawyer. Then you start to work on him in an interrogation. You get him to confess to some robberies and then to some others. And then you get him to go for the confession of the murder. And that’s when he digs his heels in. So at this point, the detective” — that’s Detective John Kelly, played by David Caruso — “he says, ‘You’re not leaving this room until you give it up.’ And he then says, ‘And if you don’t, then I’m gonna have to beat ya.’ And so then he takes his watch off. And then he takes his coat off. He even sends his gun out of the room. The guy finally confesses before anything happens, but in the end the young detective” — James Martinez, played by Nicholas Turturro, last name — “he turns to him and says, ‘Were you gonna do it?’ And Kelly basically says, ‘What do you want to hear? I believe in civil rights and in the Constitution and everything, but at the end of the day if I know that the guy did it — I mean, I know he did it — then, yeah, I’ll beat him.’ ”

HE’S THE MASTER CRAFTSMAN

If Robert Nathan were living in Victorian England 150 years ago, he might have been referred to in the British press as “the next Charles Dickens.” But because the Victorian serial novel business isn’t what it used to be, Nathan is today compared, by Variety, to Steven Bochco. And instead of putting out an installment a week in, say, the magazine All the Year Round, which serialized Dickens’s work, Nathan produces one TV show a week. Last year he wrote and produced episodes of “E.R.” This season he is the executive producer of “The Client,” which NBC began broadcasting a few weeks ago.

In addition to comparing Nathan to Bochco, Variety called him a “master craftsman.” Sitting in his new office, on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, wearing khakis and a neatly pressed blue oxford shirt, Nathan, who is 47, resembles a college English teacher. When he discusses his medium, the television drama, his eyes squint with enthusiasm behind his spectacles. “It’s Dickens! It’s Trollope!” he says. “It’s write as much as you can!”

His path to prime time reads like a bad serial novel, the one thematic constant being that the hero always follows his heart. Born in Johnstown, Pa., he grew up in a suburb of St. Louis, where he spent valuable TV hours in the stacks of the public library. After graduating from Amherst College, he made his way to Manhattan, where he wrote policy papers for the Lindsay administration on such things as landfills and incineration. In 1971, he turned to journalism, working first for Juris Doctor, a monthly journal for young liberal lawyers, and then for the New York bureau of National Public Radio. In 1974, he quit N.P.R. to write a novel, but was lured back in 1976 by the offer of the White House beat, which he quit to write a second novel, shortly after a veteran reporter delivered the following line in the basement of the White House: “You know, this is a young man’s business.” TV writing is a young man’s business, too, and this morning it is keeping Nathan young. “I love what I’m doing,” Nathan says. “I can’t envision enjoying anything else this much. I mean, you sit down at a typewriter and you write, ‘It’s raining,’ and a week later there are 120 people out on a television set making it rain. It’s great!”

As executive producer of “The Client,” which is based on the movie), and is one of a few new legal dramas this season, Nathan acts as a mentor and an editor for the writers on the show. This morning, for example, he encourages a writer concerned with the intrusion of a commercial. “You write what makes emotional sense to you,” he advises. “I’ve been breaking the network limits for two years. If it’s good, they let you do what you want.” And he sets the esthetic goals. “If you look at the introduction of Tom Buchanan in ‘The Great Gatsby,’ Fitzgerald in three sentences tells us everything we have to know about Tom Buchanan,” Nathan says. “He describes what he looks like, and then he says something like, ‘He was a man forever seeking after some irrecoverable football game.’ Fitzgerald’s ability to delineate a character in three lines of dialogue is what we have to aim for. I’m not saying we get there. I’m not Fitzgerald. But it’s what we aim for, because if you don’t, you’re writing shallow characters.”

At a slow moment between writers’ meetings, he takes a moment to describe the all-important route to the show’s first commercial break — the way writers work to hook their viewers for the rest of the hour. Using an episode of “E.R.” as an example, he talks at a fevered pitch, as if he were acting it out himself: “There was an episode called ‘Long Days Journey,’ and it came to me with an image in my head of George Clooney, who plays Dr. Ross, with his head in his hands. At that moment in the series, this particular character was beginning to realize that something was wrong with his life. He’s a pediatrician without children. Why is he a pediatrician? And why can’t he establish a relationship?

“So I start with this notion: how do I dramatize for this character that his priorities in life need some work? What I think is, Let him have a really bad day.

“So to get to the end of the first act, I have him in a sort of good mood and then the worst possible thing happens. A girl has beat her mother to death, or close to death. And he has to absorb this at the beginning of his day. And when somebody says, ‘How horrible,’ his answer is the casual, ‘It happens all the time.’ He thinks he can absorb these things, but then the day gets worse, and then it gets worse. And then he gets a case of a mother who tries to commit suicide, who happens to have a baby! So at the end of the first act he is left holding in his arms the baby of a mother who is in a coma! So what we’ve done is, we’ve taken him from true horror to worse horror, and at the end of the act we know Dr. Ross is having a really . . . bad . . . day. And then, cut to the commercial.”

THEY TAKE A STORY MEETING

THE SCENE: It is 11 o’clock on a sunny L.A. morning, and three “Law and Order” staff writers, a few moments into a story meeting, are contemplating their first coffee break, which is to be followed shortly by lunch. The suggestion to break, made by the head writer, Michael Chernuchin, is made only half in jest. The thought of contemplating a “Law and Order” script is in itself taxing. “Law and Order” is a cop show built like a jigsaw puzzle, a legal drama that prides itself on its exploration of the intricacies of the law. In Chernuchin’s office, there are more law reviews lying around than copies of The New York Post. Like so many modern drama writers, the writers on “Law and Order” don’t so much write a show as build it.

Scripts are built in several ways. Rene Balcer, co-executive producer and one of the writers, fidgets in a black leather chair against a wall and says: “A lot of times there is a headline we like. Other times there’s a legal issue and we say, ‘New York just got a death penalty. We’ve got to do a death penalty story.’ And other times we have no idea what we’re doing and we just sit here and toss things around.”

This week fate has tossed the team a headline that may appease the reigning network executives, who, for a season or so, have been asking for an episode that involves what are referred to as hooker-housewives. Hugh Grant has been arrested for soliciting a prostitute. Scriptwriting on “Law and Order,” as on most television dramas, is generally a lonely pursuit, the antithesis of sitcom writing, which is done in a room full of jokers. But today, as is occasionally the case, the staff comes together to draw what are referred to as the arcs of the show — to sketch out the one-hour drama’s four commercial-bound acts.

THE CHARACTERS: Chernuchin, 40, carries a golf club for inspiration. He comes to “Law and Order” via the legal profession. After earning a master’s degree in English — his thesis was on Faulkner’s use of Keats’s poetry — he went to law school and worked as a lawyer in New York, where he was pretty miserable. Balcer, 40, began professional life as a combat cameraman in Israel, then returned to Canada, where he’d grown up, to film and edit documentaries. After a long career writing unproduced feature scripts, he wrote a script for Dick Wolf, the executive producer of “Law and Order” (and a former writer on “Hill Street Blues”), who, during the show’s first season, asked him to join the staff. Ed Zuckerman, 47, came to TV writing from a career in journalism: he wrote magazine articles, including several on killer bees, tried to start a small killer-bee-honey company and then wrote a book about nuclear warfare, “The Day After World War III.” “After the critical success and commercial failure of my book,” Zuckerman explains, “I moved to L.A. to pursue a career in television.” Last year he put his nuclear knowledge to further use in a “Law and Order” episode entitled “Big Bang,” in which he deftly wove together issues of murder and particle physics.

The story meeting begins, which is to say, the writers finish chatting and cooperate in a long pause.

CHERNUCHIN (seated in a big chair): So . . . the network has been asking us to do a show about hooker housewifes. Now we’re gonna probably lose the hooker housewife aspect of that and just make it a successful guy with a seemingly perfect life who picks up a hooker — and then somebody ends up dead. Something like that will be very promotable. (He twirls a putter.) We want a very established guy — you know, a heart surgeon or a brain surgeon or a judge or something like that. Who has a beautiful wife, kids — a perfect family — so that it’s like Jay Leno said to Hugh Grant, “What were you thinking?” What we’re thinking now is the wife did it, killed the hooker. She was following her husband around because she thought he was having an affair.

BALCER (looking for an impending moral quagmire): And kills the hooker or kills the husband?

CHERNUCHIN: The hooker, because I think I’d love to hear his explanation of why he did it. So I want to keep him alive. But I mean, we’re just tossing that one around now.

ZUCKERMAN (detective-like): That the girlfriend did it?

CHERNUCHIN (with a line reminiscent of David Mamet, who has had his scripts rejected from this show): Yeah.

ZUCKERMAN (prosecutorialy): Knowing that it was a hooker or thinking it was a girlfriend?

CHERNUCHIN (unruffled): Thinking that he was having an affair, she sees what he’s really doing, kills the hooker and makes it look like he did it. Then she has a key piece of evidence withheld, so they can’t get a conviction against him but she’s got something on him

ZUCKERMAN: She has the evidence?

CHERNUCHIN: Something that she’s always going to be able to hold over him.

BALCER (moving in for the kill): For a wonderful relationship.

ZUCKERMAN (looking for the deeper meaning here): Is that her motive? To have something to hold over him?

CHERNUCHIN (thinking less meaning here): No. She probably just lost it.

ZUCKERMAN (on to something now): I think she’d kill me, not the hooker.

(At this point, the pursuit of story line breaks down in the search for an interpersonal truth; the writers move to mine their own lives, an occupational tendency.) CHERNUCHIN: I mean, I was watching “Married to the Mob” last night, and Mercedes Rule was just going to kill what’s-her-name, Michelle Pfeiffer.

BALCER: Yeah, sometimes, they don’t want to blame the guy. They want to blame the other woman. You know, like, “She led my husband astray.” Or whatever.

ZUCKERMAN (so totally skeptical that he may even be squirming a little): And that was an affair situation?

CHERNUCHIN (twirling his putter again): Yeah.

(A long silence, broken at last by a nervous whistle.)

ZUCKERMAN (definitely squirming now, perhaps anxious to break for lunch, which is what they will do in about two minutes): Ask your wife. What would she do?

CHERNUCHIN: She’d kill me!

ZUCKERMAN: Yeah, I mean . . . (searching for the precise words) I’ve been told!

(Fade.)