The final song of the last episode "Bang the Potts Slowly" has a line saying "Knowing there's Equal Justice here at ABC". Equal Justice was the show that ended up replacing Cop Rock on the ABC schedule.
Mike Post wrote music for this series- however this show debuted two weeks after another police procedural he wrote music for, that being Law & Order which also likely contributed to this series doing poorly in ratings.
Mis-blamed: Whenever this series is mentioned in modern culture, the general takeaway is "It was a gritty cop show crossed with a musical! On what planet could that possibly succeed?" Those who have watched it with more of an open mind state instead that the bigger problem was that it was too silly to be gritty and too gritty to be thought of as a dramedy, and thus did not fail due to its premise, but due to gross mis-management its premise, to the point that attempts to make this fit into Musical World Hypotheses are a headache. Not to mention that the songs were seemingly just inserted at random in an otherwise run-of-the-mill cop drama. For instance:
In one episode, a lieutenant has just finished giving the morning roll call and then, just as the officers are starting to get up and head out on patrol, suddenly starts singing "Leeeeet's beeee careful ou-out theeeeeere!" and out of nowhere gives a second role call —IN SONG!— with different information than the first, while the officers just sort of... stand there and watch him.
There are, in fact, a number of songs where one or two people sing while the rest just sort of watch in stunned silence.
Most of the songs aren't important to the plot at all, and could be removed entirely and you'd miss nothing, such as the aforementioned "Let's Be Careful Out There", as well as "Quitcha Bitchin'" (in which the squad's captain upbraids his officers for their constant complaints), "Garbage In, Garbage Out" (little more than cops and criminals dissing each other for nearly two minutes) or an entire revenge song aimed at a person sitting right there in the same room scowling at the others but doing nothing to defend himself.
Arguably a case of tonal mismatch more than anything else. As a fully self-aware and intentionally campy show it would make sense. Instead it was Law &Fame.
Narm: It's a cop drama turned musical comedy, what can you expect? For example: the plight of the homeless, as sung here.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The idea of combining elements of musical theatre with a cop drama is an interesting - if rather unusual - premise, but in practice it's better suited to a film or theatre production than a TV series. It also probably would have helped to have someone with a background in musical theater writing the songs, scripts and/or choreographing the numbers. Instead they went with...Randy Newman?
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