Arrested development in Third Watch

Coby Bell in Thrid Watch

The real-life drama unfolded on the set of Third Watch the other day. Coby Bell, who plays Officer Ty Davis jnr, was innocently studying his lines when his cast mate and soon-to-be nemesis Skip Sudduth attacked him with a syringe.

"There's rules to it and there's an art to it," Bell explains of their daily off-camera water-fights. "You can't just come up and squirt someone in the face. You have to be hiding and they can't see you when you do it. We're like samurais."

It's a bizarre thought, the grim-faced characters from Third Watch running around shooting water at each other with syringes, especially when we're used to seeing them with guns.

For six years, their on-screen characters have been taking out the baddies, upholding the law and keeping citizens safe. But there's a good reason for their attacks with the medical equipment, says Bell.

"You have to cut up between stuff or you'll go crazy because we're dealing with pretty serious content all the time. In between takes it's just nothing but goofin' around goin' on.

"Skip Sudduth [Sully] is one of the funniest guys I've ever met in my life, he's seriously a comedic genius. And Anthony Ruivivar [Carlos] has become one of my best friends. They live up the street so we hang out a lot. We're like little kids. Anthony and I are always finding ways to mess with each other. He'll step on my foot as hard as he can in a take, stupid stuff like that."

But it's anything but child's play when the show launches into its sixth season this week in what is probably the bloodiest, most dramatic episode yet.

Davis finds himself fighting to the death, a scene that took two days to shoot and amounts to all of two minutes on screen. A typical episode will take eight or nine days. It must be hard to keep the emotional intensity up for that long?

"The constant gunfire helps. It's loud and it's crazy. I'd never done something like that so I was a little sore. The guy who I was fighting with was a stuntman. He's a strong, strong dude, I would not want to fight him in real life."

Action aside, the year ahead also promises to be significant for Davis, who discovers the sinister circumstances surrounding his father's death. And for the first time, the storylines of the characters start to intertwine.

"That's what I like about Third Watch," he says. "The opportunity to do a combination of that stuff. We have the action and the heartfelt scenes and a little comedy in there every now and then so it's fun."

Bell, who has been on the show since it began six years ago, says he couldn't have predicted how popular it would become. The programme was created by former Chicago police officer Edward Allen Bernero and writer John Wells. Since it first aired in September 1999, it has been picked up by 20 countries.

In that time, the cast have bonded to the point where they call each other family and Bell has come to know his honourable cop inside-out. Bell says on the surface he is similar to Davis but his friends would say he's more laidback.

Before he got the part he played keyboards and sang in a reggae band. When filming started he had to give it up but his passion for music runs in the blood. His father is Michel Bell, who went from being a member of 70s band the 5th Dimension to acting and singing on Broadway. Growing up with a dad in the limelight meant Bell saw the world of showbiz, warts and all.

"Dad always said, 'Buddy, it's just a job'. I'd go to all these things and see all these celebrity-type people acting crazy and all big-headed. And he'd tell me, 'It's not the way, you should go do your job and come home. You don't need to get involved in all that craziness'."

When he's not filming Third Watch, Bell likes to take his dad's advice by spending downtime with his wife and 18-month old twins whenever he can. Usually that means heading to his other home in Southern
California, where he grew up. "When I first booked this show, I had just started dating my girlfriend, who is now my wife. We only started dating six months before and everything was going well and I get this job. They said,we were either going to shoot in San Francisco, Miami, Seattle or New York. So we didn't know for a week where I was gonna live. Then we found out and boom, I had to move to New York.

"New York and California are extremely different," he says. "I was raised in Southern California in kind of a surf community, really mellow. Moving to New York took me a while to get used to. It's just go, go, go."

But nothing could have prepared anyone for the tragedy that struck one ordinary morning in September, 2001. Bell was in his apartment when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. His instant thought was Third Watch technical adviser Michael Keene, a detective, would probably be involved in the carnage.

"As my wife and I were being evacuated from our apartment he was there covered in soot and all kinds of whatever, head to toe. It was good to see him. But he'd already lost a partner that day and they didn't know where he was at the time. As it turned out he'd been evacuated. You just can't get your head around that situation. It's too much."

To make matters worse, when he returned to work a few weeks later, the writers announced they wanted to do an episode on the tragedy.

"I said, 'You're crazy. That's way too close to home'. And then I saw the way the script was written and they did a really nice, tasteful job. It didn't show any of the actual stuff happening. It was all just how it affected the lives of the characters. So it was actually kind of therapeutic to do that episode."

And Bell says it doesn't get any easier when someone gets written on or off the show. "It's hard in a lot of ways but we all know that that's just business. You can't predict anything; you can't really get comfortable with anything because you never know."

The star - Coby Bell

The show - Third Watch
The time - Series premiere, 8.30pm, Tuesday

The place - TV2