A Recycled In Space Police Procedural, created and produced by Gerry Anderson, that ran from 1994 to 1995. The series has 24 episodes, 8 of which were directed by John Glen.
Set in the year 2040, the series followed Lt Patrick Brogan (Ted Shackelford), originally a New York City Cop, who transfers to Demeter City, on the planet Altor.
Tropes:
- Ambulance Chaser: One episode has a boy pretending to be hit by a car and demanding compensation. Then, a person explains to the driver that the boy is known to play such tricks... he's the boy's accomplice, and uses the opportunity to pick the driver's pockets. The driver doesn't care, being busy scanning the alien for suitability for his Organ Theft ring.
- Casanova Wannabe: Haldane's spectacularly poor luck with women, which is practically a Running Gag, does little to convince him he might not be as suave as he thinks he is.
- Cyber Punk With A Chance Of Rain: It doesn't actually rain much, but Demeter City rarely ever seems to have clear blue skies.
- Da Chief: Captain Podly.
- Everyone Can See It: When Jack is killed in the line of duty, a grief-stricken Jane remarks "I always thought we'd end up together." Brogan just smirks that he thought the same. (Thankfully, this entire timeline is erased so Jack lives).
- Film at 11: In every episode, right after the opening credits, there's a "This Episode" montage of the big action and special effects shots from, well, this episode, to encourage you to keep watching the show you are already watching.
- Good Cop/Bad Cop: Unusually for this trope, Older and Wiser family man Pat Brogan is usually the one to lose his cool and start shaking an uncooperative person-of-interest by the lapels and has to be called out on it by his younger and usually more hot-headed partner Jack Haldane.
- Inconveniently Vanishing Exonerating Evidence: One episode has Brogan and Haldane being investigated by Internal Affairs after a fatal officer-involved shooting. The witnesses have been hypnotized into claiming it was unprovoked, and a robot who recorded everything is broken down.
- Like a Duck Takes to Water: A key backstory element is that humans did not develop Faster-Than-Light Travel on their own, a haphazard coalition of interstellar civilizations sought them out to solve a very specific problem; crime. Every other intelligent race follows rules as a manner of etiquette, to the point of near-homogenization — until they discovered other races with different forms of etiquette, which led to them re-discovering crime. As Humanity was still primitive enough to need to practice criminal investigation, they were contacted and brought into interstellar civilization specifically to act as Space Police, which it turns out they're pretty darn good at.
- No New Fashions in the Future: Played with. From a distance, the police officers' uniforms look like present-day dress shirts with ties, but up close you can see that they're band collared shirts with a colored vertical stripe in the front.
- Oddly Small Organisation: We never do find out exactly how large an area the 88th Precinct covers, but they seem to have exactly six beat cops and a sergeant to cover all of it. No wonder Demeter City is such a dump.
- Officer O'Hara: Brogan has the ancestry, Podly had the accent (despite being an alien).
- Organ Theft: And not one that leaves donors alive.
- Really Royalty Reveal: One episode had a B-plot in which an amnesiac bag-lady suddenly started claiming to be the queen of a distant planet... so distant there was considerable debate about whether they could justify placing the quite expensive long distance call. To everyone's considerable surprise, it turned out she actually was the queen of said distant planet, and they sent a ship much larger than the station to bring her home.
- Reset-Button Suicide Mission: "Time To Kill" has a murderous cyborg killing almost the entire main cast aside from Brogan. Brogan is able to go back in time and prevent the moment that created the cyborg. He and a previous version of the cyborg slowly fade from existence just as Past!Brogan comes into an alley, confused as to what he just saw.
- Space Jews: Right down to the Yiddish accents.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Brogan discovers a body lost on a spaceship for twenty years. The investigation leads to Alden Humes, a one-time top industrialist until he became a hermit who never leaves his apartment. Humes is confused when Brogan shows up to explain that the body has just been identified as...Alden Humes. He then waves a hand right through Humes, revealing he's nothing but a highly sophisticated hologram. Humes' assistant, worried his boss' partying ways would ruin the company, killed him and programmed the A.I. hologram to believe it was Humes, now an eccentric hermit. The realization of what he is allows the hologram to be able to take a more physical form while utilizing computer systems and electrical powers to gain revenge.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: A little girl separated from her parents... and with the power to induce heart attacks.
- A World Half Full: For all the cyberpunk stylings and generally grim state of the city, the majority of cops are always shown to be competent, honest and dedicated to their jobs.
