An Open Letter to Steven Bochco:

The 10 PM Manufacturing Drama America Will Love

By Jack Russell

Dear Steven Bochco: Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue changed the rules for evening television and so changed American culture. Your best work brought gritty realism to primetime and showed that millions would respond to complex stories sustained by ensemble casts. I write with respect for your 25-year achievement - and to propose your next great series.

The adult-hour ensemble programs have now explored to exhaustion the drama of police precincts, law offices and hospitals. These venues worked for the 10 PM drama because they blended a core of characters developed over time with the endless variety of the crime or emergency case du jour. We knew Furillo and Sipowitz would be there for us but never knew what part of America might explode into their lives on any given week. Consider the possibilities of a new venue, Steve - the small manufacturing firm. Here are some numbers to blunt the bleats of your ratings-focused overseers. In America, 342,000 manufacturing establishments employ 14 million workers. Some 338,000 of these plants have fewer than 500 employees - the federal definition of “small.” Together they employ nearly 10 million workers. Add a spouse on the sofa, and you have 20 million Americans who could tune in because your new show is about them. Many of them feel invisible. But no longer, because Steven Bochco will create Making It in America.

Here's the story line. Let's start with the heroine of Making It in America. Maria Andolini is 46, attractive, Catholic on her own terms, smart without any college and both happy and sad that her kids have left. She's a little bored with life in Reading, Pa., but knows that she and Tony are good. Then Tony drops dead at the plant on a Monday morning and Maria has decisions to make, including the big one: to sell or try to run Precision Production, the firm Tony built from the 12-man job shop he inherited from his dad. She takes the leap -- and wins America's heart.

Can Maria make Precision Production work and save the jobs of the 105 folks who depend on the firm? Will they accept her leadership? What does it take to make it in America as a small manufacturer? Believe me, Steve - there's as much drama here as the ER or the mean streets. True to your signature pattern, each episode will begin with the daily drill that gathers most of the ensemble. In Making It in America, it's Maria walking the shop floor at the beginning of the main shift, touching base, hearing problems, feeling the pulse. She usually walks with Joey, the hard-nosed plant manager who was Tony's best friend and Maria's first serious high school love 30 years ago. The walk-around always ends with a raspy-voiced greeting from Moms, queen of the back-office and confidant of Maria.

On any given day/episode, we may see Molly, the fine-looking single mom who does set-ups while fending off dudes on the floor, or the always-tangled tandem of Sal and Hal, one a 57-year-old tool-and-die maker, the other a 20-something computer geek. Together they are making Precision a full CNC operation. Much of Maria's day is spent coping with the world beyond the shop. Tony took on a major investing partner to grow the firm before he died. Now the passive partner, Tom Grupper, has an active interest in Maria's assets. She and Joe cope with buyers from their customers, some ball-busting bastards who hammer on price, others who talk cooperation but still want 5 percent price reductions each year.

In each show, we see multiple stories, most of which develop over several weeks. An early theme of Making It in America (to be known as MIA after the fourth episode) is Maria and Joe dreaming and then planning to make Precision Production into a product-based firm rather than a job shop subservient to manufacturing customers. (A sober lesson in this adventure is a meeting with a Wal-Mart buyer who wants to know what they can do - at her price.) In the first fall, Maria is getting a hard education in the China Price. Joe drives Lean on the floor, but they can't give endless price concessions. Maria gets involved in her regional trade association and learns enough to wonder who the Administration really serves. She goes to Washington to testify at a House hearing - and senses she's being gamed. This December episode ends with Maria, feeling very alone, walking down Pennsylvania Avenue to encounter the lighting of the National Christmas Tree.

OK, Steve. You get it - my gift to you. America is waiting for your next act of genius, the 10 PM drama that finds our national soul in the stories of a small manufacturer.