All episodes Season 12 S12E20 2005-03-01 60 min 1990s ABC

NYPD Blue

Moving Day

TV Flash files “Moving Day” as a desk essential hour — NYPD Blue (1993–2005) on ABC, season 12, episode 20, aired 2005-03-01, 60 min.

From the desk

How this hour is filed

This leaf is S12E20: listed hour 261 of 261 in the NYPD Blue guide, last listed hour of season 12. It aired 2005-03-01 (60 min). The listed hour before it is “Bale to the Chief” (S12E19). No later hour is listed in this guide.

Essential hour

Essential hour: “Moving Day”. Moving Day: twelve seasons later, the living-room patent on flawed cops finally clocks out of Manhattan South.

NYPD Blue — Moving Day (S12E20)

Catalog log

Broadcast listing — not a TV Flash recap.

As he begins his new job as squad commander, Sipowicz disobeys orders and keeps a murder investigation open... even though a Japanese man with diplomatic immunity has confessed to the crime.

Viewer FAQ

Where does Moving Day sit in the NYPD Blue guide?

S12E20 is listed hour 261 of 261 — last listed hour of season 12, season 12 episode 20.

When did NYPD Blue S12E20 air?

Moving Day aired 2005-03-01 and is listed at 60 minutes.

Why was it controversial?

It pushed mid-1990s network limits on profanity, partial nudity, and adult subject matter — the standards-and-practices war was weekly news.

In the series

Why this series still plays

Butts, badges, and Sipowicz — Bochco and Milch teaching broadcast how to be adult out loud. Dennis Franz's alcoholic detective is the decade's great network antihero badge: bigoted, broken, still the moral furnace. Twelve seasons of language fights, cast shakeups, and precinct grit that primed living rooms for flawed cops before cable took the patent.

Flash: September 21, 1993, ABC, Manhattan South. Butts, badges, and a language fight already in the EPK. Steven Bochco and David Milch did not ask the museum guard whether broadcast was allowed to be adult out loud. They put detectives on a shift where alcoholism, divorce, and precinct politics bleed into the case. Dennis Franz's Andy Sipowicz is the decade's great network antihero badge — bigoted, broken, still the moral furnace. Sources close to Standards & Practices were *unavailable for comment*. They were…

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Filed against

Also in season 12

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