NYPD 24/7 (Tuesdays, June 22 through August 3; 10 to 11 p.m.; ABC) presents sixteen months inside the New York Police Department, edited down to seven hourlong episodes by executive producer Terence Wrong, who brought us equally absorbing inside looks at the Johns Hopkins hospital and the Boston mayor’s office. Whoever decided not to lead with next week’s tabloid hour—about a female vice cop who goes undercover as a prostitute, and Emergency Services’ rescue of a potential suicide on the Henry Hudson Bridge with a rope and a police boat—deserves at least a commendation and maybe a Peabody. Instead, the series leads with the rivetingly precise detective work that solves a stabbing case by following a cell phone from midtown to New Jersey.
Farmingville (June 22; 10 to 11:30 p.m.; Channel 13) examines the surprise immigration of 1,500 Mexicans to a suburban Long Island town whose original population was only 15,000—triggering debates on property values, hate crimes, quality of life, and border violence without a border. Too bad those Farmingville citizens who need construction work, landscaping, and lawn-mowing can’t outsource the grunt work to an invisible labor force in some nafta vassal state.
Everyday People (June 26; 9 to 10:30 p.m.; HBO) looks at race and class relations from the point of view of the employees of a Brooklyn restaurant about to be gentrified out of existence. It turns out the working poor aren’t at all stupid and everybody is at least as complicated as a novel. Nelson George co–executive produces, Jim McKay directs, and Stephen McKinley Henderson and Sydnee Stewart are among the actors who workshopped this production into such affecting shape.
Celibacy (June 28; 10 to 11:15 p.m.; HBO) looks at Buddhist “defeminizing” initiation rites, Hindu wrestling gymnasia, and Eastern Orthodox convents in Romania as well as the Roman Catholic Church—not to mention piercing, whipping, and other sadomasochisms in religious worship and erotic games—for clues to the wisdom of such policies of deprivation and their connections to sex-abuse cases. Written, produced, directed, and narrated by Antony Thomas.