A disparate group of Metro Los Angeles police officers - the rank and file - bond over their commonality of being brothers in blue despite their differences. The other thing they all seem to need is a venue to blow off some steam together, what they collectively call "choir practice": after hours piss ups, usually in public, where they again can relieve the pressures of the work day. Despite their brotherhood, not all their lives they feel they can share with each other in the overwhelming sense of what it means to be a real man in this environment. A few weeks in their lives and a few choir practices later are shown, when three of the younger officers, Baxter, Lyles and Bloomguard - the latter two who served together in Vietnam - are temporarily assigned to night duty in Vice under the leadership of Sgt. Scuzzi, who they always assumed was the janitor; as young Proust tries to mitigate the negative effects of his unabashedly blowhard, redneck and bigoted partner, Roscoe out on the street; and as "Spermwhale" Whalen - so nicknamed for being thirty pounds overweight - inches ever closer to retirement and a twenty year pension, it never a certainty he will make it in his continual clashes with the upper brass, especially Lt. Grimsley.